Heure Bleue
I come from the north - the great north! Known to all since the success of the film "Les Ch'tis".
After a spell in cosmetics, I learned, applied and taught the art of skincare and make-up. During this period, I was lucky enough to meet a beautiful brunette with unforgettable charisma: Gisèle, my mentor. She wears Heure Bleue exquisitely.
Later, I had the opportunity to choose between two companies, an American company and Guerlain. For Heure Bleue, I accepted the offer of this beautiful house. At first, I didn't dare wear it, but I had to give up Oscar de la Renta. Later, I learned that it was a pale copy of Heure Bleue.
One day, I took the plunge and it was a huge success! And since then, I've never left Heure Bleue.
I don't often wear perfume, being all day long smelling of blotters or my skin or the skin of others. But when I want to seduce, or simply find myself, a few drops of Heure Bleue at night before I go to sleep and the next day I am comforted, confident and refreshed.
The history of Heure Bleue
Heure Bleue was created by Jacques Guerlain in 1912.
It is a very faceted perfume, full of nuances. The top notes are bergamot and aromatic notes, followed by a floral bouquet of carnation, Bulgarian rose, orange blossom, jasmine, violet and heliotrope, with a woody base of moss, labdanum and, above all, vanilla, with a very subtle musk note.
Jacques Guerlain is a genius! He invented gourmandise. First with Heure Bleue (this fragrance smells like marshmallow) and Shalimar, the first oriental nectar built around vanilla.
One summer evening, Jacques Guerlain is walking and suddenly stops; he is disturbed by the spectacle before his eyes: nature is bathed in a blue light, a very deep, indefinable blue; it seems to conspire to an infinite tenderness, an infinite sweetness. It is a silent hour, an hour when man is in harmony with the world and the light, when all the exalted scents speak of infinity. It is the hour when the sky has lost its sun and has not yet found its stars. It seems as if all the elements come together to suspend time. This rare and fragile moment, Jacques Guerlain felt it and said this: "I am unable to express my confusion, my emotion, only this perfume is worthy of it.
This masterly work is a tribute to those last moments of respite before the war. Heure Bleue is the perfume of sweetness and nostalgia. The perfume that both suggests and imposes the memory of the person who wears it.
Bottle: created by Raymond Guerlain in collaboration with Baccarat. The bottle has an inverted and hollowed-out heart (a first in the glass industry), a nod to this period of romanticism. The curves at the top of the bottle show the influence of curviling. This bottle was reused for Mitsouko (1919), as if to open and close a parenthesis between the beginning and end of the war.
Another way to experience Heure Bleue
Once upon a time, there was the Blue Hour.
Jacques Guerlain, a visionary perfumer, shares with Charles Baudelaire a love of perfume, scents, and an attraction to a favourite time: twilight.
This particular moment is translated into olfactory notes, and is part of the chromatic palette of sounds, colours and smells. It is the Heure Bleue, suspended and mystical, fragile and sensual, rare and precious.
One summer evening in 1912, while walking through the countryside, Jacques Guerlain had an aesthetic revelation from Mother Nature. He was not struck by the fire of inspiration, but rather intoxicated by the mental and phantasmatic construction of what would become the perfume capable of conveying 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 fleeting and mobile intermediate moment all the fragility, harmony, unity and threatened balance of life. He had the sensation, for a moment, of reaching eternity. A moment of perfection, a moment of pure poetry, a total moment. The perfume artist took care to translate the emotion felt in this precious moment with a subtle floral fragrance: a bouquet of warm, heady flowers, Bulgarian rose, iris and jasmine, but also heliotrope and St. John's wort to immortalise the summer character.
A great perfume was born, Heure Bleue, the hour when everything is suspended, between reason and passion, a perfume that stops time... Some people translate telluric emotions with words, others with notes; Jacques Guerlain had the gift of doing so with accords of scents. To enter Guerlain time is to cross the steps of the temple of sublimated beauty.
(Text by S. Favier)
Sylvaine Delacourte perfumes
Discover Sylvaine Delacourte's brand with her Orange Blossom, Musk and Vanilla Collections. You can try them thanks to the Discovery Boxes (5 Eaux de Parfum x 2 ml) and rediscover these raw materials as you have never smelled them before.