A Brief History of Chanel No. 5

Folklore decrees that somewhere in the world, each and every minute, of each and every day, a bottle of Chanel No. 5, is bought. It remains at the top of the international best-selling fragrance lists almost a century since its creation by Ernest Beaux, perfumer to the Russian court, introduced to Gabrielle Chanel by her then lover, the Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, who escaped revolutionary Russia with the chemist to settle in Biarritz in 1920. A year later, in 1921, Parfum…