Reflections
on the state of perfume writing occasioned by my reading of
The
Secret of Chanel no. 5:
The Intimate History of the World's Most
Famous Perfume (2010), by
Tilar J. Mazzeo
There
is a serious dearth of books on perfume. Trust me, I've looked. A
short stack of books are read and praised by perfume lovers because
only that short stack exists. To be honest, most of the best of a bad
bunch are not really up to snuff, if compared to works about other
cultural phenomena written by serious critics with the appropriate
theoretical background to support their claim to expertise regarding
the topics about which they write.
Part
of the problem in the area of perfume—aside from the gushing
enthusiasm which seems to substitute in some cases for training and
education—appears to be a general deficit of critical acumen among
people who are really quite good at self-promotion but much less good
at digging very deeply into the topic of perfume. They exalt
themselves as experts and then, because there is no one around to
dispute such claims, readers simply accept that the authors are what
their publishers vociferously proclaim: the experts.
Perfumistas
brush all of this aside. They don't care about credentials. “All
you need is love” is what many apparently think. Guide
groupies bristle at anyone's attempt to point out that personal
attacks on perfumers and houses are not a form of valid criticism—and
indeed exemplify fallacious reasoning. It all becomes ugly when
critics attempt to criticize the pseudo-critics. That, it seems, is
not permitted. We must love all perfume lovers who are attempting to
elevate the object of our love—no matter how inept and
self-defeating their efforts may be in the grand scheme of things,
beyond the cloistered community of full-fledged fragrance fans.
Chandler
Burr studied business and economics before studying, well, Luca
Turin, after which Burr was curiously named the perfume critic for
the New York Times. Was that appointment, too, like his
current post as The Curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at
MAD, his very own idea and a result of his own pitch to have himself
appointed to the position? I ask because it has been years since Burr
departed from The Times, and no person has yet been named to
fill the “vacancy”. Is it that no one can fill his shoes? Or is
it that no one else has dared to assert that their undying love of
perfume qualifies them to bear the impressive title “The New
York Times Perfume Critic”?
The
nearly total absence of serious intellectuals directing their
energies to the topic of perfume has given rise to what looks rather
like a Lockean property first-dibs expertise schema, whereby the
first people to have the bravura to label themselves “experts”
become through that very act accepted by the ignorant masses as “the
experts” about perfume.
There
has been no need for intellectual rigor in writing about perfume to
this point in history for the simple fact that there are so few
perfume books in existence that virtually anything which anyone
manages to get published will be praised as great by a small cluster
of perfume enthusiasts—dare I say fanatics? In a culture
which continues to regard perfume as a mere toiletry—or, at best,
an accessory—anyone who cares (obsesses?) enough about perfume to
be buying books about the subject is not going to be all that
selective. They do not have that luxury, again, for the simple reason
that perfume has yet to be taken seriously as an object of sustained
intellectual critique.
There's
a chicken-and-egg problem here: no one—aside from perfume junkies
and geeks—seems to be taking perfume very seriously as a cultural
phenomenon, one worthy of sustained critique, precisely because no one aside
from juice-addicted perfumistas takes perfume seriously at all, with the notable exception, of course, of those who are in the business of perfumery for
the bountiful profits which it reaps.
There
are a few astute bloggers here and there, but in the published book
category, not much has happened yet. Pseudo-intellectual drivel
spewed out about perfume by slick public relations teams deployed in
the service of a few aspirants to wealth and fame (and free perfume!)
does not help in this regard. Outsiders, the non-perfumistas, cannot
take diaphanous perfume marketing campaigns masquerading as high
theory seriously. And why, after all, should they?
So
there is Perfumes: The A-Z Guide, which portends to be a work
of criticism and vaunts being the “only” book of its kind. I've
said it before, and I'll say it again: the only book of its kind is
both the best and the worst of its kind, and until better books come
along, many people will continue to praise that work as great. In
reality, Turin and Sanchez do no more in that book than to broadcast
their own tastes and promote some perfumers and their creations,
while demoting others in rude and sometimes vicious terms.
This
point is obviously lost on many perfumistas, but in every other realm
of inquiry there is a clear distinction between criticism, on the one
hand, and slander and insults, on the other. Unfortunately Turin and
Sanchez do not appear to recognize that distinction and brazenly and
boorishly conflate the two, offering ad hominem attacks and
personal insults in lieu of arguments or principles of aesthetic
criticism. An abundance of passion and enthusiasm is not an effective
substitute for reason, and being ready and willing to yell louder
than anyone around does not imply that one is right.
Books
for and by perfume lovers tend to show their bias—and pretension—on
their covers. Turin and Sanchez allowed their musings to be published
under the highly misleading title Perfume: The A-Z Guide, when
it is nothing of the kind. The title is in fact triply mendacious.
Fortunately, members of online fragrance communities are slowly
becoming more savvy through their exposure to a wide range of reviews
written by many different people. As a result, even some of the
former Guide groupies appear to be coming to the recognition
that, however passionate Turin and Sanchez (and Chandler Burr after
them) may be about perfume, they are ultimately, at the end of the
day, attempting to persuade readers that idiosyncratic and subjective
values and tastes are objective truths.
Another
Case in Point
Provocative
titles sell books, as many consumers do judge a book by its cover.
Tilar Mazzeo's The Secret of Chanel no. 5: The Intimate History of
the World's Most Famous Perfume (2010)
offers another example of the same. To sell books, one must have
a claim to exclusivity and expertise—or pay deference to those who
have made that their claim to fame. Chandler Burr's name is
emblazoned prominently as the author of the first blurb on the back
cover of The Secret of Chanel no. 5. Mazzeo thanks Turin and
Sanchez on her acknowledgment page for having taken the time to speak
with her. This is how the “expert” system works, too, in
academia, where the back-cover blurb industry is frankly laughable,
so perhaps I should not be surprised. The difference is that there
are no checks and balances of any kind in the tiny universe of
entirely self-appointed perfume critics.
What
is odd about this book is not that Mazzeo is a true believer in the
greatness of Chanel no 5—who
but a true believer would bother to attempt to write the cultural
history of a single perfume? No, what is a bit surprising is only
that her preaching to the choir should be so very flagrant.
Leaps of logic abound throughout the story of Chanel no 5 as told by
Mazzeo, as she sets up what appear to be genuinely intriguing possibilities, and then in a short phrase resolves the question at issue with
the bald statement, in effect, that Chanel no 5 is great, what
is both the first premise and the conclusion of this work.
In
this regard, Mazzeo provides a book-length example of the informal
fallacy known as “begging the question”: to assume as a first
premise what one is attempting to demonstrate. (As an aside, in the
vernacular, “begging the question” has come recently to be used
by people as a substitute for “raising the question”. So one
often sees the observation that “this begs the question...,” after
which a question is posed.)
Unfortunately,
all of the leaps in Mazzeo's “history” lean toward the
protectionist side, minimizing any detraction from the hypothesis of
the greatness of this perfume and its creator, all of which leads one
to suspect that this is not at all “The Unauthorized Biography,”
as the inside jacket of the book enticingly boasts, but the “thoroughly approved by the suits at Chanel” version of the story.
Devotees will complain (as did Guide groupies before them): "So
what? If you want a better book, why don't you write one?”
This
sort of response, according to which it is somehow gauche or
inappropriate to criticize already published books, that the only
acceptable response is to publish another one to replace it,
misunderstands the nature of criticism. You publish a book, and you
put it out there in the world to be read. Some people will disagree
with what you say and call you out on your false, and in some cases
fraudulent, claims. That's the chance that you take.
Is
the solution to stuff critics' mouths with socks and duct tape them
shut? No, it is not. Is the only acceptable response to a mediocre
book to publish a better book on the same topic but which avoids making the same mistakes? No, it is not. A critic may not have
the interest or desire to devote the years of research needed to get
to the bottom of the question. That does not mean that she is
required to accept as gospel whatever the shucksters say.
There
is a genuinely interesting question here: why is Chanel no. 5
so popular and famous? Well, to anyone familiar with even the
broadest contours of the business of perfumery—or business more
generally—it might seem that the obvious answer, superlative
marketing and hype, should indeed be the best explanation of this
perfume's phenomenal success. But, no, Mazzeo “informs” the
reader: it is not just marketing; it is not just hype. It is that
Chanel no 5 is something somehow transcendent. But is it, even
according to Mazzeo's own marshaling of the facts?
Gabrielle
Chanel granted control of the perfume branch of her eponymous company
to the Wertheimer brothers in exchange for a percentage of profits
paid back to her. Why? Because she wanted to focus on fashion, not
the production and distribution of perfume. When the perfume became
more popular and profitable than her haute couture, Chanel came to
experience seller's remorse. This sort of thing is not at all
uncommon in the history of business. The person who came up with the
idea of Victoria's Secret, a company amazingly devoted solely and
unashamedly to lingerie, so that ordinary women could walk into the
store without feeling like a whore, sold the idea to someone else who
developed it to resounding success. The woman who masterminded the
root idea of The Body Shop, also sold her rights, and we all know how
that story ended, with stores in cities all over the world.
Even Facebook is said to have derived from the root idea of a couple
of Mark Zuckerberg's cohorts at Harvard. (See The Social Network
(2010), if you are unfamiliar with the story.) What matters in all of
these cases is not the bright idea, but how it is nurtured and
capitalized upon. Bright ideas are a dime a dozen. Entrepreneurs take
such ideas—wherever they came from—and run with them hard and
fast.
In
the case of Chanel no 5 perfume, the Wertheimer brothers were
incredibly savvy at business, more so even than Coco Chanel. The
brothers, being Jewish, expatriated right before the German
occupation of France to avoid—well, extermination—having sold the
majority of the company to an Aryan partner, Félix
Amiot, under whose management the company, too, could continue
to survive. Under the law at the time, Jewish persons were not
permitted to own businesses, and Coco Chanel was ready and willing to
do what she needed to regain control of what had by then become a
thriving perfumery business. But she was not quite as savvy as her
partners, for they beat her to the punch, selling the company before
she wrote her infamous letter to carry out her “civic duty” by
reporting the Jewish ownership of the perfume branch to the
appropriate authorities.
Working
in the United States, the Wertheimers continued to devise ingenious
marketing strategies. They got the needed Grasse jasmine smuggled out
of France and delivered to humble Hoboken. Mazzeo describes how the
brothers also decided to stop advertising in the 1940s in order to
cut costs. As she tells the story, the natural materials needed to
keep the perfume top quality required that corners be cut elsewhere.
Of course, they did not reformulate—that would have been to ruin
the perfume! Let's see, what would the Chanel company line on
reformulation be, I wonder? I believe that it would be in their best
interests to deny that the perfume was ever reformulated in any way.
Until, of course, that becomes impossible. With the end of the use of
natural musk in perfumery, reformulation became ineluctable, but
Mazzeo assures the reader near the end of her tale:
Chanel
No. 5 fans need not worry, though, because Chanel No. 5
still has those rich, warm scents of skin and that note of intense
sensuality that Coco Chanel always wanted. As Christopher Sheldrake
explains, while those nitromusks were wonderful, powerful, and
inexpensive, they were not irreplaceable. There are ways to re-create
their warmth and powdery textures in a perfume. It's just that they
can't be replaced on the cheap, and most fragrance houses aren't
prepared to spend the money. And, as perfumer Virginia Bonofiglio
quips, "You can't make cheap that smells like Chanel No. 5."
In
discussing the restrictions imposed by the IFRA regarding the use of
jasmine in perfume, Matteo assures the reader, again:
New
IFRA allergy restrictions won't threaten the perfume either, because
for several years researchers at Chanel have been committed to
finding a permanent solution. Among those hundreds of molecules in
natural jasmine, it is only one or two that have the potential to
cause even the most sensitive among us any problems. Creating a
synthetic jasmine as nuanced and subtle as the natural jasmine of
Grasse would be an impossible undertaking, but breeding just one or
two molecules out of a plant or finding a technique to remove one or
two molecules from an extract is entirely possible. Soon, Chanel
hopes simply to have resolved the problem of jasmine sensitivity
entirely. They hope that, eventually, the jasmine from Grasse will be
something anyone can wear without hesitation—no matter how daringly
high the doses.
For
now, the legacy of the perfume is safe. Despite changes around it,
the world's most famous fragrance remains essentially unchanged and
timeless.
Goodbye
scholarship. Hello, marketing text! And three cheers for GMOs!
To
return to the World War II scenario, Matteo explains that rather than
compromising the quality of the perfume through cheapening its
formula, the Wertheimers instead undertook an initiative which made
Chanel no 5 not just profitable, but universally loved: they
distributed the perfume through the same channels—the military
commissaries or PXs—which delivered food and cigarettes to the
troops abroad, wherever they were stationed. Soldiers bought up the
perfume for their mistresses or their loved ones back home, and by
the end of the war, every woman, it seems, as Mazzeo tells the story,
wanted nothing more ardently than a bottle of Chanel no 5—perhaps
even more than world peace!
The
question which Mazzeo does not answer is this: if it is true that the
Wertheimers were so keen to sell as many bottles as possible, and if
they knew that their new and vast client base had no perfume
sophistication whatsoever, then why in the world would they not
reformulate, so as to cut costs further and dramatically increase
profits? No, Mazzeo insists. They would never have done such a thing.
Throughout
the book, Mazzeo deflects any worries about any possible compromises
to the formula of Chanel no 5 in exactly the same way: by flatly denying that they ever took place. Unfortunately, her grounds
for this denial appear to be no and more less than her own fervent belief in the continuous integrity of the perfume, through thick and
thin, and even at its low point, when the perfume had come to be
broadly distributed through American drugstores.
As
we all know, the other perfumes which went the drugstore
route—consider the sad case of what once were the Coty
classics—were horrifically reformulated and never restored.
Reformulation in other cases has been a one-way street. Mazzeo simply
denies that it ever took place at all in the case of Chanel no
5—despite the fact that it was being sold alongside other
ghastly reformulations at the drugstore at the same time.
It
is true, of course, that Chanel no 5 is in much better shape
today than, say, Coty Muguet des Bois or Emeraude or
Nina Ricci L'Air du Temps or... the list goes on and on. But
that does not show that Chanel no 5 was never being sold in an
inferior formulation while being mass-marketed at drugstores.
Instead, it suggests that under subsequent management, the perfume
was brought back to its luxury status—and, one surmises, was
re-reformulated to the point of at least approximating the original
perfume.
What
can the grounds be for Mazzeo's insistence on the perfume's
uninterrupted integrity beyond the fact that the company denies that
reformulation ever took place? The Wertheimers were businessmen, not
believers in the sacred immortality of the product which they were
peddling. To them, it was a commodity like any other, so why would
they cut into their own profits by producing Chanel no 5 at a
quality level likely to go altogether unnoticed by the sorts of
people—soldiers and their lovers—to whom it was being sold? No
answer is given to this question by Mazzeo, because it should be
obvious to any of her readers—most of whom are no doubt already
true believers—that such an aesthetic crime would be tantamount to
murder.
To
return to the question of how Chanel no 5 ascended to
universal icon status, what Mazzeo does not address is whether the distribution of the perfume to emotionally fraught and
love-starved troops—allied and axis alike—would not have done the
same for any other perfume distributed in that way. This was
what catapulted Chanel no 5 to its status as the number-one
selling perfume, where it has stayed since World War II, and what secured what Mazzeo seems to think will be its eternal fame. In truth, the wild
popularity of this particular perfume could be explained by the
ingenious distribution scheme alone—the creation of this perfume as
a coveted object replete with profound significance as a symbol of survival and
the scent of victory and relief.
After
spending the entire book beating back any possible suggestion to the
effect that Chanel no 5 might not be a sacred and
transcendent object worthy of our eternal worship—akin to a
religious totem—Mazzeo waffles in her final chapter, ascribing the
greatness of this perfume to its legion of fans and attempting
to anchor it in individual wearers' subjectivity. She writes:
Instead,
the secret at the heart of Chanel No. 5 and its continued success is
us and our relationship to it. It's the wonderful and curious fact of
our collective fascination with this singular perfume for nearly a
century and the story of how a scent has been—and remains—capable
of producing in so many of us the wish to preserve it. Think of
that number: a bottle sold every thirty seconds. It is an astounding
economy of desire.
The
root problem with this account is that the author simply ignores what
would seem to be the real reason why throngs of fans wore
and continue to wear this perfume. They were lured by marketing and
hype to buy the perfume, or their lovers or husbands were seduced to
purchase it for them. Once a bottle of the perfume had found its way to their vanity tray, these women wore
Chanel no 5 and then, of course, it did become their own—for
many it was and remains a signature scent.
The
problem with Mazzeo's logic is that she supposes that the inherent
properties of the perfume are the explanation for the perfume's fan
base. If that were the case, why in the world would Chanel need to
pay Brad Pitt $7 million to jump start sales? Clearly Chanel no 5
does not sell itself. It requires a huge marketing outlay and
ingenious schemes for its continuing success. The first generations
of wearers are now dead or moribund. What to do next?
Today,
in the twenty-first century, as World War II fades from people's
memories, the company is trying once again to drum up enthusiasm for
a perfume whose time may have come. An overdose of aldehydes combined
with precious essences of jasmine and rose was new and exciting in
1921, and the popularity of the perfume was renewed with each
successive marketing scheme, but as the last World War II soldiers
and survivors take leave of this world, so will the profound
existential significance with which Chanel no 5 was infused
throughout much of the twentieth century. We still associate this
perfume with images of Marilyn Monroe, dead now for more than fifty
years, and the models who represented it in subsequent decades:
Catherine Deneuve, Carole Bouquet, Nicole Kidman, Audrey Tatou, and
now Brad Pitt. Perhaps Pitt will be the nail in this coffin.
Needless
to say, I am not a believer and was not converted by Tilar Mazzeo's
book to the view that the resplendent success of Chanel no 5, a
good perfume to be sure, has more to do with its allegedly divine
beauty than with how it was promoted and distributed
throughout the twentieth century. If you are a true believer, then
you'll surely read this book as the welcome revelation of gospel. You
may enjoy Mazzeo's attempt mystically to link the pristine white sheets at Coco's
orphanage to the glacial plains of Siberia and the prominent aldehydes
featured in Chanel no 5. No harm in that—don't we all like
to read what we already believe? But for everyone else, the most
plausible answer to the question What is the secret to Chanel no
5's success? remains unchanged by the publication of this book.
The answer, in a phrase, is: marketing and hype.
