Its vintage charm stems from a huge dose of powder and a big blended bouquet of very classic, perfumey flowers like carnation, jasmine and ylang ylang. The final notes of powdery vanilla in the last chapter are the most feminine and are memories of an era that is passed.

I like it in late autumn early winter when it really comes to its own - dark evenings, footsteps on an empty cobbled street, maybe sneaking out to meet your secret lover. I feel like I've finally "grown into" vintage Guerlain as I previously felt too young to appreciate this. It was like every perfume in my perfume closet, my grandmother's dresser and my mom's medicine cabinet exploded and a cacophony of fragrances hit me at once. This note, to some, can be a bit off-putting, so I apply it very sparingly when going into public, but use it more liberally when at home. Synaesteticaly L’heure Bleue is more L’heure Fuchsia; less Parisian twilight and more Bali Hai in that scene in 1958’s South Pacific.I personally find powdery scents a bit difficult to wear (in terms of finding an appropriate season or occasion) but this is an absolute masterpiece and I’m happy to have it in my collection.

What has become a revelation to me however in my mental join-the-dots game of perfumery, is discovering that final destination, Guerlain-ville, the Ithaca of the Nose, in its family of classics, from peppy Jicky to Debonair Mouchoir de Monsieur to L’Heure Bleue to the great Shalimar. After the initial aggressive blast, the vampy middle notes started to come out and she started to show herself. Of the fantastic feminine trio that I have labeled as minimally unisex - Shalimar, Jicky and L'Heure Bleue - the latter is the one with a less masculine facet.

Brace yourself for that wave of melancholy, for it is bound to catch you off guard for sneaking that cheeky glimpse into the grand evening that once was. Wistful and poetic, the drydown journey is an incredible impressionistic olfactory masterpiece capturing the ephemerality of dawn and dusk. I like a lot of perfumes and love some, but never have I come across one that felt like a missing part of me. The vanilla is not sugary, it is more reminiscent of vanilla pods than the normal gourmand icing sugar vanilla of today’s perfumes.