Chanel N° 5 Turns 100 Years Old: Here's Why The Number 5 Was Chosen

Classic comes to mind when thinking of the creations of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, the founder of the French fashion house. The free-spirited woman thought her Maison needed another luxury fragrance to match. She was way ahead of her time with her designs that were known as emancipated. With the women's pants , jersey materials and a chain on the bag to keep the hands free. And just like these innovations, the perfume also had to become different than usual: the essence of the modern woman in one fragrance. That led Gabrielle to the famous quote: "A woman should smell like a woman, not like a flower ".

Gabrielle had Ernest Beaux design a special and intense "perfume for women with a feminine scent". The 'nose' makes her smell a visionary composition in which aldehydes were used for the first time. Gabrielle preferred version number 5 of the perfume, and decides to keep using this number as a name. Everything under the credo less is more .

For this new perfume she chooses a completely new bottle, with a white label and a faceted stopper. In 1986, Jacques Polge, Chanel's 'nose' since 1978, reinterprets the composition of his predecessor to make N ° 5 a fuller version: the eau de parfum .

It was May 5, 1921 when the fashion designer on Rue Cambon in Paris produced her first perfume, unique in the fact that she was the first designer to attract enough attention with only a last name on the bottle. But the combination of jasmine, may rose, ylang-ylang, patchouli, lily, iris, vetiver, sandalwood, vanilla and amber was also appreciated by N ° 5. The scent smells different on every skin: it is not without reason that Marilyn Monroe once said: "In bed I wear nothing at all, except Chanel N ° 5."