A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of taking part in a Chanel Grand Parfumer Masterclass. a complimentary, bookinng-only one-on-one service conducted at elite spaces such as the the Harrods Perfume Salon in London and Brown Thomas in Dublin. The first thing that caught my attention is that, instead of being asked straight away, “What do you like?” I was asked something much more interesting and intriguing: “What, exactly, are you smelling?”
I was expecting a workshop in which one mixed a perfume or identifies its ideal scent. I could not have been more wrong. This was not so much about fragrance discovery but about taking part in a comprehensive, guided investigation of the House’s olfactory world. Through scent and storytelling, guest were led from the flower fields of Grasse to two of Chanel’s most important collections, Les Extraits de Chanel and Les Exclusifs de Chanel. The point was to understand how a great perfume is conceived, constructed and kept alive.
That continuity is unusually literal at Chanel. Gabrielle Chanel placed Ernest Beaux in charge of the House’s perfume laboratory, and only three perfumers have followed him: Henri Robert, Jacques Polge and, since 2015, Olivier Polge. Chanel also owns its formulas and maintains close control over the materials that enter them. In an industry built on secrecy, this gives the House something more valuable than a good archive: an unbroken creative memory.
Gabrielle Chanel used radicalism to liberate women in the 1920s. From adapting traditional naval uniforms and owning a Great Dane (Gigot) to creating a perfume that shattered the rigid codes that ruled the female perfume world with Chanel No5, a fragrance that proved women could be both pure (using flowers like jasmine and May rose) and seductive (delivered by ingredients such as musk, amber and sandalwood).
N°5 remains the inevitable starting point. It did not invent aldehydes. Houbigant’s Quelques Fleurs had used them in 1912. What Beaux and Chanel did was push them to an audacious level, dispersing jasmine, May rose and ylang-ylang into something abstract. Mlle Chanel wanted to break away from traditional perfumes that replicated single flowers. Her vision was to create an unprecedented, abstract composition that challenged expectations. She famously asked Beaux for a scent that “smells like a woman, not like a flower”. On 5 May 1921, she selected Beaux’s fifth sample. The res is literally, history. Even its packaging became a design reference. In 1959, MoMA’s exhibition The Package praised the 1924 N°5 box for the sophistication of its black lettering on white and its deliberate understatement.
Since 1987, Chanel has worked exclusively with the Mul family in Pégomas to protect its Grasse flowers and the knowledge required to grow them. The nearby extraction facility, built in 1988, allows petals to be processed within an hour of picking. A 30ml bottle of N°5 Extrait may contain the equivalent of 1,000 Grasse jasmine flowers. Iris pallida demands even more patience: its rhizomes spend three years underground, followed by three years drying before they can be transformed.
Chanel’s Les Exclusifs and Les Extraits revisit the house’s olfactory archive, where jasmine, iris, woods and resins become
a century-long conversation between memory and modernity.
Les Exclusifs reveals House history as coded biography. Gardénia gives scent to Chanel’s beloved camellia, a flower that has none. Coromandel translates her lacquer screens into patchouli, benzoin and vanilla. The name 1957 conceals two coordinates: 19, the day of Chanel’s birth, and 57, the Manhattan address of its largest American boutique.
Then comes the ritual. Les Extraits are applied from the stopper rather than sprayed, and their bottles are closed by baudruchage, a 19th-century method involving a fine membrane, lacquered cotton thread and a black wax double-C seal. Only a handful of specialists can perform it.
With its Grand Parfumeur initiative, Chanel is deepening consumer luxury experiences and reinforcing its heritage as a high-perfumery house. The ultra-exclusive masterclasses show how the fashion house is actively shifting fragrance shopping away from transactional purchases toward sensory storytelling.
Author: Julia Pasarón
If you are a fan of Chanel perfumes, you may enjoy reading our exclusive interview with Olivier Polge, Chanel’s In-House Perfume Creator.
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