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Top Smeller. His quality control is achieved by the grand nez (great nose), who sniffs and tests all the ingredients that go into the top-secret formulas. Wertheimer's grand nez is 72-year-old Ernest Beaux, who created Chanel No. 5 for Designer Gabrielle Chanel 33 years ago, when she wanted a new perfume for a style show. Beaux turned up with two series of scents, one numbered from i to 5, the other from 20 to 24. Highly superstitious, Mile. Chanel picked No. 5, because her collection was to be shown on the fifth day of the fifth month. Later she went into the perfume business, and in 1924 Wertheimer bought her out.
In testing the 30-odd ingredients of a perfume such as Chanel No. 5, not all the smells that waft up to the Great Nose are pleasant. To "fix" the perfume by uniting other ingredients, perfumers use such sour or fetid-smelling substances as musk, castoreum (made from beavers' testicles), ambergris (a secretion in the sperm whale intestine), and civet glands. Explains Beaux: "Pepper and salt don't taste pleasantly when taken alone, but they enhance the taste of a dish." Beaux gives each essence the nose test because some scents will last after a week of exposure, while others, for some unknown reason, will last only a few7 hours. When he is creating a new perfume he does no sniffing, simply jots down a formula, claims he knows exactly what the final result will smell like. Says Beaux: "It is like writing music. Each component has a definite tonal value ... I can compose a waltz or a funeral march."
Wertheimer has no present plans for Beaux to create any new perfumes, since it takes years of work and $100,000 in promotion to establish a brand. All the major perfumers rely on one famous brand for 75% to 80% of their business. Says Wertheimer: "If you have one excellent perfume, you've got all you could possibly want." Two are enough for him.
-For a bottle of perfume retailing at 1,000 francs in Paris, the ingredients cost only about 150 francs. Other cost items: the bottle itself, 100 francs; taxes, 270; advertising, 50; retailer's profit, 330; manufacturer's profit, 100.