Through the lens and scent of Chanel No.5

MANILA, Philippines - If you loved Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge and No.5 the Film, the latter of which is a 180-second-long commercial (or short film) for Chanel No.5 (costing US$42 million, by the way), you have one person to doff your hat to: director Baz Luhrmann.

Luhrmann has again worked his flair for the dramatic and rich narrative. Think The Great Gatsby except shorter — a lot shorter!

Called Chanel No.5 The One That I Want, it stars supermodel Giselle Bündchen and Michiel Huisman with production design by Catherine Martin and directed by Luhrmann.

Luhrmann calls Bündchen “emblematic of her time, just like Coco Chanel was.” The high-gloss film starts with a shot of Bündchen in the sea and swimming up the surface and then climbs onto her surfboard, and in the distant beach house, her man Michiel Huisman leaves a goodbye note.

Judging by both No.5 films. Luhrmann seems to like depicting the lives of women who have it all except for their true love, but in the end they find that as well.

Chanel No.5 is a composition of notes, including the synthetic notes called aldehydes, used for their unique expressions and their subtle combined effects as opposed to strong notes of actual flowers and plants. Aldehydes give Chanel No.5 that ambiguous floral-citrus-soapy scent.

CHANEL No.5, the world’s most famous fragrance, was created in 1921 when Coco Chanel asked the great perfumer Ernest Beaux to create a fragrance that reflected her vision of modern femininity. No. 5 was her lucky number and it was the fifth submission presented to Coco Chanel, thus a legend was born with the name CHANEL No.5

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