The fragrance Chanel No. 5 recreates a scent that perfumer Ernest Beaux whiffed while traveling where?
— That was the (badly worded) $500,000 question yesterday on the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Answer below the jump.
Answer: inside the Arctic Circle.
Read more at Yale Prof Makes Do with Quarter Million at the Hartford Courant.
That must be one of the more ridiculous claims in the long history of perfume advertising.
But he did get the idea of an icy clean smell from having served during the First World War in some part of northen Russia? Forgotten the detail, but there some truth to the story I thought …
You have a better memory than I do…if I had heard this story, I’d forgotten it. Wonder if it was in the recent Chanel No. 5 book.
I think it is. But I’m too tired after a long day at work to even reach it down from the shelf!
Hope you got a good night’s sleep!
Yeah? It didn’t strike me as an “ad copy” sort of thing at all.
Whiffed while traveling where…whew!
Exactly.
Beaux probably “whiffed” all the fresh flower fields and aldehyde farms of the Arctic circle?
🙂
Hmmph. That phrasing makes it “whiffed” as in when Casey was at bat.
I know that the recent Chanel No. 5 book points out that Arctic ice has been analyzed & shown to contain aldehydes. But I honestly don’t remember an Ernest Beaux trip to the North Pole….
Wasn’t there a story that No. 5 was created to smell like snow?
Really? I had NO IDEA about this.
It is in the book. I remember, because I’m still trying to read it. Author’s style is awful.