L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain: History of a Suspended and Mystic Perfume
I am originally from the north—the far north! Known to all now since the success of the film “Welcome to the Sticks.” After a stint in cosmetics, I learned, applied, and taught the art of skincare and makeup.
During this period, I was lucky enough to meet a beautiful brunette with unforgettable charisma: Gisèle, my mentor. She wore and wears L’Heure Bleue exquisitely. Later, I had the opportunity to choose between two companies, an American company and Guerlain. For L’Heure Bleue, I accepted the offer from this beautiful house.
At first, I didn’t dare wear it; yet I had to abandon Oscar de la Renta. Later, I learned that it was a pale copy of L’Heure Bleue. One day, I took the plunge and there, huge success! And since then, I have never left L’Heure Bleue.
I don’t often wear perfume, spending all day smelling blotters or my skin or the skin of others. But when I want to seduce, or simply find myself, a few drops of L’Heure Bleue in the evening before falling asleep and, the next day, I am comforted, confident, and regenerated.
The History of L’Heure Bleue (1912)
L’Heure Bleue was created by Jacques Guerlain in 1912. It is a highly faceted perfume, full of nuances.
- Top Notes: Bergamot, aromatic notes.
- Floral Heart: Carnation, Bulgarian rose, orange blossom, jasmine, violet, heliotrope.
- Base: Woody (moss, labdanum), and above all very vanilla-scented, with just a musk note very subtly dosed.
Jacques Guerlain—a genius!—invented gourmandise. First with L’Heure Bleue (this fragrance smells deliciously of marshmallow) and Shalimar, the first oriental nectar built around vanilla.
The Inspiration: A Summer Evening
One summer evening, Jacques Guerlain was walking and suddenly stopped; he was troubled by the spectacle he had before his eyes: nature was bathed in a blue light, a very deep, indefinable blue; it seemed to conspire to an infinite tenderness, an infinite softness.
It is a silent hour, an hour when man is in harmony with the world and the light, where all exalted scents speak of the infinite. It is the hour when the sky has lost its sun and has not yet found its stars. It seems that all elements unite to suspend time.
This rare and fragile moment, Jacques Guerlain felt it and said this: “I am unable to express my trouble, my emotion, only this perfume is worthy of that.” This masterful work is a tribute to these last moments of respite before the war. L’Heure Bleue is the perfume of softness, of nostalgia. The perfume that suggests and imposes at the same time the memory of the one who wears it.
The “Inverted Heart” Bottle
Bottle created by Raymond Guerlain in collaboration with Baccarat. An inverted and hollowed-out heart bottle (a first in the glass industry), a nod to this period of romanticism. The curves, placed at the top of the bottle’s body, show the influence of Art Nouveau (curvilinear). This bottle would be reused for Mitsouko (1919), as if to open and close a parenthesis between the beginning and the end of the war.
Another Way to Experience L’Heure Bleue
Once upon a time, there was L’Heure Bleue. Jacques Guerlain, a visionary perfumer, shared with Charles Baudelaire the love of perfume, scents, and the attraction for a predilection temporality: twilight.
This particular moment translates into olfactory notes, fits into the chromatic palette of sounds, colors, smells. It is the Blue Hour, suspended and mystic, fragile and sensual, rare and precious.
One summer evening in 1912, during a walk through the countryside, Jacques Guerlain had an aesthetic revelation given by Mother Nature.
He was not struck by the fire of inspiration, but truly intoxicated by the mental and fantastical construction of what was to become the perfume capable of accounting for the emotions felt in this carnal communion with nature, inscribed in a magical and secret temporality.
While the day remained in suspense and the night delicately instilled its sensual breath, he perceived in this intermediate, fleeting, and mobile moment, all the fragility, harmony, unity, the threatened balance of life. He had the sensation, for the space of an instant, of reaching eternity. Moment of perfection, moment of pure poetry, total moment.
The perfume artist took care to translate the emotion felt, in this precious instant, by a subtle floral-type perfume: a bouquet of warm and heady flowers, Bulgarian rose, iris, and jasmine, but also heliotrope and St. John’s wort to immortalize the summery character.
A great perfume was born “L’Heure Bleue,” the hour when everything is suspended, between reason and passion, a perfume that stops time… Some translate telluric emotions with words, others with notes; Jacques Guerlain had the gift of doing it with accords of scents.
Entering Guerlain time means crossing the steps of the temple of sublimated beauty.
(Text by S. Favier)
