Photo: Janine Falcon
This ancient, scratched-up Chanel No 5 spray wasn’t always mine. It belonged to a girl I never met, who roomed with my best friend at college in New England in a typical, off-campus student house with mismatched furniture and an emptyish fridge. The house was owned by Kevin, a towering, affable guy who managed the town’s coat hanger factory, which is psychically as far away as you can get from the most expensive college in the US.
One time I was visiting and nosing around in the bathroom for toothpaste, I saw something that seemed completely out of place. Trying to sound casual, I said to Kevin “there’s Chanel No 5 in the medicine cabinet.”
“Oh. That must have been Charlotte’s,” he said. “She moved out. You can have it.”
Who leaves Chanel behind? My best guess is someone who already has a lot of Chanel or unfettered access to more Chanel. This was unfathomable to 20-year-old, poor student me. This abandoned bottle was almost half full and I wouldn’t have been any more surprised to find a Fabergé egg or a diamond bracelet.
I shouldn’t have been. The girls who attended this college were very fancy, but hid it under baggy sweaters and thrifted jeans. My friend explained that back home they had “long driveways” which was her oblique way of saying that their (rich) families lived in enormous houses, set so far back from the road that they weren’t visible to passersby.
I took the bottle, obviously. It was impossible to pretend I didn’t want it. Thirty-five years later I have a lot of perfume (none of it nicked from other people’s bathrooms, by the way.) And even though it’s always been rather banged up, I continued to buy refills for Charlotte’s bottle. The fact that this style and size is still available speaks volumes about the endurance of Chanel.
It now lives on my dresser, beside an even older No 5 bottle that belonged to my mother. It’s not called hoarding when it’s Chanel, right?