What’s inside CHANEL No.5? Ambassador Margot Robbie explains

What does it take to create an iconic perfume? The creative process varies from scent to scent, but most start with a concept, an idea or the desire to bottle up an otherwise intangible feeling. For Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, it was the idea of a perfume that ‘smelled like a woman’. Open-ended, but also novel given the state of fragrance at the time (single-note floral scents).

CHANEL N°5 was the fifth option presented by perfumer Ernest Beaux based on the above brief, who artfully layered florals like jasmine, iris, lily of the valley and rose with amber, musk, synthetic aldehydes and ylang-ylang. The finished product was rich, warm and slightly soapy but bold. It’s also dynamic, the composition shifting slightly based on the pH of the wearer.

N°5 has been fronted by many women (Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Denevue, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard) including modern day muse Margot Robbie. Robbie has been a friend of the house for years and given her multi-faceted life as a mother, actor and producer, fits the CHANEL woman archetype perfectly.

Robbie is well-versed in the art of story-telling, and turning intangible feelings into something more real. Perfume-making is a similar experience: it involves the marrying of creativity, emotion, communication and bringing to life something that is not otherwise real.

“I think both a perfumer and an actress, doing a similar thing in similar ways… it’s emotional storytelling,” Robbie explains. “It’s a little bit of an invisible personal signature.”

Robbie adds that she likes to use scent to help her get into character. “I find it really helpful to pick a fragrance for every character I play… I find scents to be very transportive.”

Olivier Polge is CHANEL’s in-house perfumer creator, and responsible for modern interpretations of the perfume. Together with Robbie, he visited Grasse, where CHANEL grow and harvest several of the raw materials used within N°5, including jasmine and rose. Each flower is picked by hand – it takes 1000 jasmine flowers just to produce a single 30ml bottle of N°5.

Perfume making is a creative pursuit; an art form, even. It draws many parallels with acting, film-making and story-telling in general. It makes perfect sense that N°5 is fronted by Robbie, who understands the importance of not just how the scent smells, but also makes us feel, both in the moment, and for the minutes, hours and days that follow.