L'Heure Bleue Guerlain (1912)Eau de Toilette

L'Heure Bleue (Eau de Toilette) by Guerlain

Bottle Design Raymond Guerlain

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Top 55 in Women's Perfume

8.6 / 10 115 Ratings

L'Heure Bleue (Eau de Toilette) is a popular perfume by Guerlain for women and was released in 1912. The scent is floral-powdery. It is being marketed by LVMH.

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Perfumer

Jacques Guerlain

Ratings

Scent

8.6 (115 Ratings)

Longevity

8.0 (109 Ratings)

Sillage

7.3 (109 Ratings)

Bottle

8.7 (108 Ratings)

Submitted by Nibelung, last update on 06.06.2020.

Variant of the fragrance concentration

This is a variant of the perfume L'Heure Bleue (Eau de Parfum) by Guerlain, which differs in concentration.

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Reviews

03/10/2019

9.5
Scent 9
Longevity 8
Sillage 10
Bottle

Chanelle
1 Review

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Chanelle

Top Review 29

Immortal

L'heure bleue is one of Guerlain's undisputed masterpieces. As a young woman I admired him from afar, found him cold-sensual, but much too ladylike for young, wild and single me. Again and again I met him over the years, I read about him, smelled him at others and tested him now and then. At some point (more than 20 years ago) I bought a bottle and almost never used it, because it was too daring for the job or shopping, too noble to celebrate and too strong for more intimate things. So I felt my first eau de toilette L'heure bleue, and the bottle was never empty.
Then I smelled the Extrait, which brought me new knowledge concerning LHB: It goes even more powdery, at the same time also sweeter, going into the nutty and above all also more erotic! What a fragrance! But as with the incredible Liu Extrait - when to wear? Both fragrances demand an appropriate situation, environment and society. Otherwise I would feel as if I had committed a sacrilege, because - I do not exaggerate! - both have something almost sacred inne.
(Now back on the carpet, girl...)
Already in perfume times I bought a vintage EdT from LHB. This built the bridge between sacred and portable. It was powdery and wonderful and you could tell the proper dose of neroli I needed to put on the scent during the day. I never wanted to miss him again. Again I used it sparingly, but this time not for lack of opportunity, but for fear of never meeting LHB again in this perfect form for me. A piece of advice from another perfume group came to my aid: Aging!
I tried it. In spring 2017 I bought a freshly filled bee flacon with LHB EdT. I subjected the scent to a quick test and found it too weak, soulless and meaningless. The bottle was repacked and it went off to the basement.
Yesterday she was allowed to come up again. I filled a pocket bottle of it and sprayed myself generously. I was already where I wanted to be. Surrounded by a sea of heavy flower scents, a shaken amount of neroli and a delicate but not chaste powderiness. The fragrance had won, in two ways. He has indeed attained a maturity with which he now corresponds to what I had wished for from him. Besides, he won my heart. Now we can age together, but it makes me feel immortal.

9 Replies

11/25/2018

5.5
Scent 7
Longevity 8
Sillage 8
Bottle

Annarosa

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Annarosa

Not my thing

With " L' Heure Bleu", with this famous Guerlain classic, even in the moderate eau de toilette concentration, I can't do anything. For me it smells almost like the prelude of "Cornubia" by Penhaligons, which was made 2 to 3 times louder, more intense, but without the sweet honey chord of "Cornubia" in the course (for which I like her then anyway).
The scent of L'Heure Bleu feels as something artificially appearing aroma of salty almonds richly pollinated with the old face powder (make-up note, which "Cornubia" thank God does not have). The resulting aroma is unfortunately quite unpleasant and a no-go for me (although I of course know that many other people like the scent or that they feel it differently from me)
The latitude and the sillage of the fragrance are good.

1 Replies

11/07/2018

8
Scent 8
Longevity 7
Sillage 8
Bottle

Aventurin

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Aventurin

Top Review 33

The beautiful and the damned

I read some books at irregular intervals, including the wonderful autobiographical novel "Die Schönen und Verdammten" by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

Gloria Gilbert and Anthony Patch are at the centre of this moving story. Two iridescent figures, idiosyncratic and gifted, wanderers between suffering and lust, emptiness and thirst for life, crashes and hope. They love the stormy heartbeat of the metropolis and the magnificent palette of beauty, sink into the dream of wealth and freedom and the wild, never-ending nights of the glamorous twenties. They are the shining star couple of every party, they live and celebrate decadently and freely.
Since both have little to gain from everyday life and conventional employment and have little pleasure at all in working, but all the more in consuming, the flow of big money stagnates; instead, plenty of tears and plenty of alcohol flow.

L'Heure Bleue is a fragrance that fits into this extravagant world - not because it captures the noisy flickering of untamed dance steps on shiny black parquet flooring, but because it swirls with all the ecstasy of escapism and reality, light and shadow.
He reveals violet-blue dream landscapes, underscores bitter tragedy,
glows pale coppery and white gold, is bitter and dry, flowery and powdery, complex and tenderly mysteriously interwoven.
It is a special, memorable scent, whose opulent carnation nostalgia certainly does not please everyone, it is not a scent for sober asceticism, it is one to be patiently fathomed to grasp its magic.
It heralds the end of one day and the beginning of the next, warm summer night magic and autumnal morning melancholy, when the hours of repentance and reflection dawn, when the glasses are emptied and the feet are sore danced.
When the pale sun unveils shine broken by grey stripes of cloud and wounded hearts, but the twilight leads back into the blue expanse, hand in hand, every day anew, illuminated by chandeliers, candlelight and hungry lurking souls.
A fragrance as special and fascinating as Gloria and Anthony and their whole colorful-abysmal cosmos.

And if Gloria Guerlain were to direct Guerlain's fate, perhaps this great classic would no longer exist, because when Anthony asks her "Don't you want to preserve the old? Everything beautiful grows only up to a certain height, then it begins to care, fades away and evaporates memories as it fades away. And just as every period of history passes in our minds, so also the things belonging to that period of time should pass away; in this way they will be preserved for a while in the few hearts that are receptive to it - in mine, for example."

L'Heure Bleue does not pass away, it preserves its beauty and continues to grow, like all that is good and precious, destined to stay and grow, and will reach some hearts in all times.

19 Replies

05/30/2018

8
Scent 7
Longevity 5
Sillage 7
Bottle

loewenherz

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loewenherz

Top Review 19

My nights are nicer than your days

This is now - after Eau de Parfum and Extrait - the presumed last comment I will write on L'Heure Bleue. Unless Guerlain decided to suddenly provide flankers to this Trinity (which they cultivate with many of their ancestors), which I would not expect, let alone hope for. Much of what is good and right at Guerlain has - within the framework of regulatory requirements - remained unchanged for a long time.

The first commentary on L'Heure Bleue - the Eau de Parfum - I wrote along Huysmans À Rebours, a classic of the decade literature of the Fin de Siècle. For the second - the Extrait - I tried the metaphor of Chazelles enchanted film wonder La La Land. For this last one, the Eau de Toilette, I use a film once again - one that describes yet another side of this great fragrance.

My nights are more beautiful than your days, in the French original: 'Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours', is the name of an expressive and crazy, infinitely sad film, based on the novel of the same name by Raphaële Billetdoux - a film that tells of the happiness of the moment, the vulnerability of beauty, the right to eccentricity, the intoxication of sensuality. And Guerlain's L'Heure Bleue does all that too.

L'Heure Bleue - the eau de toilette just a little less than its 'stronger' big brothers - is an intoxicating, incredibly multi-layered perfume. That exhausts its own transience to the point of exhaustion in a vortex of flowers, colours, bitterness. Lively. Urgent. The full-scale anise of perfume history. Violets all idle. Gold-clear sweetness far beyond what Monsieur Wasser fills today in Guerlains bottles.

Conclusion: one, perhaps THE classic from the pen of Jacques Guerlain. As opulent as Huysmans À Rebours. Dreaming is just as much a slave to tribute as Chazelles La La Land. As intoxicating and self-abandoning as Andrzej Zulawski's surreal and crazy film. It's a must to have had it up your nose.

2 Replies

02/28/2016

9
Scent 8
Longevity 8
Sillage 10
Bottle

MasterLi
371 Reviews

MasterLi

A thing of beauty... is a joy forever.

L'Heure Bleue is really a perfume unlike any other. You sometimes have to ask yourself if a perfume is still being made over a century after it was first launched then it really must be quite something, in order to still be able to captivate hearts & minds.

The story is that the master perfumer Jacques Guerlain was one day walking along the banks of the river Seine in Paris during the "blue hour", the very last hour of daylight before evening sets it. In film & photography, this is known as "magic hour", when dusk is approaching twilight, and it is arguably the most beautiful time of day. He was overcome by emotion at that point and felt something so strong that he could only express it in a perfume, and so created L'Heure Bleue, or the blue hour.

This perfume is significant for many reasons... and it's symbolism runs deep. It was created in 1912, the year in which the Titanic sank (at that time the world's biggest ship). It was also released two years before the First World War, which would claim the lives of millions across Europe and elsewhere, and which would leave an entire generation devastated. To some, this perfume represents the last breath of an old world, a world which would later disappear and vanish forever.

The perfume itself follows a very elegant, masterful blend of gentle, sweet, evocative, refined powdery notes (most of which are so well blended that it's hard to pick out). It's very much like an impressionist painting, the painting itself is made up of a host of tiny dots with the paintbrush but which comes together to blend into a masterpiece of art and expression. To me it is a waxy, subdued, sweet, rich, slightly-gourmandish oriental floral perfume. The notes which stand out are iris, heliotrope and carnation, mixed with a deep, almost gourmand oriental vanilla (a typical hallmark of Guerlain). The iris provides the soft, powdery "waxy" note, whilst the strong heliotrope mixed with the vanilla gives a feeling of soft yet ever present sweetness in an almond desert kind of way. The carnation is a dusty floral feel in the background which contributes to this old and otherworldly feel.

For me L'Heure Bleue is a very special kind of perfume. In fact it's less of a perfume and more like an "experience". I have the Eau de Toilette, and I find it very easy to wear. There is nothing shocking about it, it just smells very different to anything you will find today. I really cannot explain the smell more than that, but the last thing I would say is that even if you never own this, at some point you should try it. If you have any serious interest in the appreciation of what perfume is, as a creation, then you should try this. If only to "experience" what it is all about. It doesn't smell modern, for sure, although it's still totally wearable in my opinion. Like some other complex perfumes, you may also need to have a lot of experience with smelling different types of fragrances, in order to really understand this. Try it, and you'll see what I mean. Incredible!