L’Heure Bleue

Is there a better example in modern perfumery of how inextricably a name can be linked to the experience of the juice it introduces than Guerlain L’Heure Bleue? No one can argue with the place of Mitsouko (which, seven year later in 1919, marked the defeat of Germany and the end of World War I) in perfume history, but L’Heure Bleue is another story entirely. Somewhere along the way, it got lost in the annals. It was, and still is, produced but people forgot about it. Or, alas, people never got to know it. It was too quaint, perhaps, in its art nouveau bottle. And with the dawn of the sexual revolution, it didn’t sound the bacchanalian call-to-arms. But, like Chanel No. 5, it contained in part the very DNA of the Guerlain brand; for, at day’s end, people would remember its contemporaneous bedfellows – brainchildren of Jacques Guerlain – Shalimar and Vol de Nuit among them.

L’Heure Bleue is not a statement about feminity. It is a form a feminity, if a slightly angular one. It is a poem. It coheres. It communicates an emotion. It holds a secret in its fragile hands – the fragile hands of the evening. When I look at it closely, I see its parts, but like the branches of the trees reaching up into the crépuscule it becomes a unitary thing: the moment frozen and fleeting that we have all experienced and tried to grasp and couldn’t.

Beautiful, easeful melancholy in a bottle. It is the Poet’s and his alone.