The Secret of Chanel No. 5 Read Free Page B

the point of the satire was still to poke fun at her–and she was a proud woman. Most difficult of all was the way that Sem had unerringly chosen her perfume as the way to ridicule her past–a perfume that privately captured something essential about her sensuality. It cut close to the bone.
    She had identified with Chanel No. 5 intimately from the beginning. Bringing together the scrubbed asceticism of Aubazine and opulent invitation of musk and jasmine, it was the scent of her past. The trouble was that Sem recognized it, and now those complicated affairs of the heart were being publicly satirized. Because the connections between Coco Chanel and her signature scent seemed so obviously intimate, the cartoon’s appearance had become a public occasion to tease her personally in a way that had never happened with her daringly understated dresses. This kind of mockery and the pain it caused must have been considerable.
    P art of what makes any scent potentially painful is the way in which it can serve for any of us as an intimate emotional repository. As Coco Chanel once put it, thinking of the loss of Boy Capel and her scent memories, “Suffering makes people better, not pleasure 6 . The most mysterious, the most human thing is smell. That means that your physique corresponds to the other’s.”
    Whatever we think about the value of suffering, Coco Chanel was right about scent. It does mean that our bodies somehow correspond. In the circuitry of the human brain, scent and our feelings for each other are also hopelessly entangled because there is a specific part of the human brain–"ancient,” if we think about it in evolutionary terms–known as the
rhinencephalon.
This part of the brain processes two things: smells and emotions. In fact,
rhinencephalon
in Latin simply means “nose brain.” As neuroscientist Rachel Herz writes in her book
The Scent of Desire,
7 “the areas of the brain that process smell and emotion are as intertwined and codependent as any … could possibly be.” This is why the scent of a missing lover’s shirt or a mother’s favorite perfume can move us so deeply.
    The basic structure of the human brain means that scent and sensuality are hopelessly–and wonderfully–caught up together in a network of desire. This was at the heart of Coco Chanel’s relationship to her No. 5 perfume. When a journalist just a few years later suggested that she invented the little black dress in order to put the whole world into mourning for Boy Capel, Chanel was furious. The idea was tasteless. She was equally defensive about her identification with No. 5; it had always been a scent about her most private emotional terrain.
    Those satires by Sem–the first public images of Chanel No. 5 in its history–had a powerful impact. They are an eloquent and silent testimony to the astonishing desire that this fragrance instantly inspired, but they are also probably part of the reason Coco Chanel set out to create some public distance between herself and her perfume. It was the beginning of an ambivalent relationship to her creation that would wreak professional and emotional havoc for decades to come. Chanel wouldn’t willingly appear in an advertisement for the fragrance for almost twenty years–not until 1937–and, even then, she probably didn’t know that she was posing for one.
    So it is easy to understand why, if this was the early “advertising” she was getting for Chanel No. 5, Coco decided to place the product in the hands of talented marketing professionals whose job would be to manage not just its distribution but its image. Soon afterward, she would do precisely that. She would always regret it.
    W hat she did next was an astonishing thing. Just at the moment Chanel No. 5 was becoming a stunning success, Coco Chanel signed away her rights to it.
    The decision would shape the direction of her life, and it would be at the