Ernest Beaux

Overview

Ernest Beaux was born in Moscow to French parents and trained at Rallet, then the largest perfume house in Russia and supplier to the imperial court. He is known almost entirely for one composition: Chanel No 5 (1921).

The perfume’s importance is not only olfactory. No 5 established the aldehydic floral as a family, and it established a commercial model — a couturier commissioning a fragrance from an outside perfumer and selling it under her own name — that the entire designer fragrance business now follows.

Training and background

He joined Rallet in Moscow around 1898 and became its technical director. The house was sophisticated and well supplied, and Beaux’s formative work was done there, including Rallet No 1, which grew out of his 1913 Bouquet de Catherine — an aldehydic floral that is generally accepted as the direct precursor of No 5.

The Revolution ended that career. Beaux served in the French army in the north Russian intervention and returned to France, joining the Chiris operation at La Bocca, Cannes, where he was working when Coco Chanel approached him in 1920.

Signature style

Beaux’s style is bright, abstract and unnaturally clean. His compositions do not smell of flowers; they smell of the idea of flowers seen through something cold and sparkling, and the aldehydes are the instrument of that.

The other characteristic is scale. No 5 uses aldehydes at a level that had no precedent, over a very expensive floral heart of jasmine and rose with ylang-ylang, iris, sandalwood and musk beneath. The composition is not subtle and was not meant to be.

Materials and technique

The technical signature is the aldehyde overdose, and the well-known story — that a laboratory error produced the dose — is almost certainly apocryphal; Rallet No 1 shows he had been working the idea for years.

What the aldehydes do is worth stating precisely: they lift and abstract, giving a floral accord a soapy, effervescent, slightly metallic brilliance that reads as modern and as clean. Beaux also used the newly available synthetic musks and a very high proportion of natural absolutes, and No 5 was expensive to make from the beginning.

Key works

Houses and collaborations

His career divides at 1920. Before it he was a Russian-house technical director; after it he was Chanel’s perfumer, a role he held until his retirement, when Henri Robert succeeded him.

The Chanel relationship is the significant one and is unusually well documented. Chanel asked for something that smelled like a woman rather than a flower, and Beaux presented a series of numbered submissions of which she chose the fifth. The commercial arrangement — the fragrance owned by the Wertheimer family through Parfums Chanel, the couturier’s name on the bottle — set the template for the licensing industry.

Influence

The aldehydic floral remained the dominant serious perfume genre for roughly fifty years, and No 5 is its origin. Beyond the family, Beaux’s influence is commercial: the designer fragrance, the numbered series, the perfumer-as-supplier relationship.

It is worth noting how little else he is known for. Beaux composed a small number of works, several of them excellent, and the shadow of one of them is so long that the rest are rarely discussed. Bois des Îles in particular is held in higher regard by perfumers than by the public.

Historical assessment

Beaux is securely canonical and thinly documented. Much of what circulates about him — the aldehyde accident, the Arctic-water inspiration for No 5’s coldness — is anecdote of uncertain provenance, and the Rallet No 1 evidence undercuts the more romantic version.

No 5 itself has been reformulated continuously for a century, and the current material differs substantially from the 1921 composition in its animalics, its mosses and its naturals. The Osmothèque holds reconstructions; the comparison is instructive and slightly deflating in both directions.

Sources