Guerlain Launches L’Heure Bleue, Its First Feminine Fragrance in a Decade

You don’t experience Paris through color, per se. Lights, yes, thanks to the Eiffel Tower sparkling each hour, illuminating the evening sky. Noise? Absolutely, from tourists sputtering in their native languages roadside. But color? Not so much. At least, I never paid close enough attention to the city’s colors until a recent evening stroll on my way to the French pharmacy revealed what happens after sunset, when the sun’s hazy orange glow and the darkening evening sky mingle, one slowly overtaking the other for just a few moments. It’s what Parisians call l’heure bleue, or blue hour. French perfumer Jacques Guerlain took notice of this transitional period during a walk along the Seine in 1912, inspiring him to preserve the fleeting moment with the launch of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue.

More than 100 years later, Delphine Jelk, perfumer and director of perfume creation at Guerlain, turns to that same twilight. Her task wasn’t to reinvent the 1912 icon, but to transform its essence into something that honors its roots while championing a new spirit. If there’s a story to be told about Jelk’s L’Heure Bleue, it’s one that positions a color often associated with men as a hue of femininity and strength. The new L’Heure Bleue marks Guerlain’s first feminine-focused fragrance in a decade. The brand’s previous legendary scents, Shalimar and Mitsouko, were always marketed and designed to be unisex.

A highly visual creator, Jelk built a mood board alongside the formula, assembling images, textures, and words to translate her internal story into both visual and olfactive form. There were blue velvet and organza ribbons to convey softness and transparency; blue shirts; multiple shades of blue; Parisian scenes; Impressionist art; contemporary painter Inès Longevial; and floral imagery of irises and orange blossoms. The result is a joyful, nonstereotypical vision of womanhood that rejects overtly pink codes in favor of understated strength: think dancing around the house in an oversized blue poplin boyfriend shirt fresh out of the laundry.

For Jelk, L’Heure Bleue isn’t simply a fragrance, but a form of armor that, she hopes, makes its wearer care a little more about how she feels in her body. Ahead, Jelk talks about breathing new life into the 1912 icon, her three-year creative process, and what “blue femininity” actually means.

After creating hundreds of fragrances throughout your career, what do you feel makes a good perfume?

A good perfume is a recognizable perfume, and one that you want to go back to. When you wear it, you’re like, “I want to smell it again and again.” And a good perfume is one that has a nice sillage—it creates an aura around you. It has to be long-lasting. Recognizable, long-lasting, good sillage, and addictive.

Guerlain is approaching a major milestone: 200 years. How does that anniversary speak to the brand’s impact in the fragrance industry?

I think it shows that Guerlain is a creative brand because you wouldn’t be here after 200 years if you hadn’t been bold and audacious. When you see the iconic perfumes like Guerlain Shalimar, Mitsouko, L’Heure Bleue, those are perfumes that were so new at the time; it really shows how the brand was a leader in the fragrance field.

Why did you want to take on L’Heure Bleue?

I really wanted to create a perfume for today, inspired by this beautiful idea of l’heure bleue, keeping the soul of what Jacques Guerlain did before and adding what I find very interesting. I don’t want the patrimony to be heavy or dusty. I wanted to keep the soul of the brand audacious and creative, using the most beautiful ingredients. I added raw materials that Jacques Guerlain didn’t have in his palette at that time. Plus, I definitely create for women today. I love this idea of being a woman, creating for women, and true femininity, not a pink femininity. I think blue for women means that, and we don’t need to shout our femininity. We can feel very feminine in a boyfriend blue poplin shirt. That was really the idea.

How did you grapple with what to preserve and what to push with your new creation?

I have to say, it was totally intuitive and, in a way, selfish. I really kept what I love. But when you create, you are obliged to put a lot of yourself into it because that’s how it will be emotional. You have to create with your heart. So when I smelled the original L’Heure Bleue, what I loved the most was not the head (the top note), but the dry down, which was orange flower, iris, and vanilla. For me, it smelled like a marshmallow. And how bold was it to create a marshmallow in 1912? So I absolutely wanted to keep this part. The “marshmallow” smell was built mainly with iris, which gave it a very chic and sophisticated feel.

Also, I thought a lot about what Jacques Guerlain felt when he launched L’Heure Bleue in 1912. That was a very romantic moment, given the Impressionist era. I understood all the shades of blue, why everything was blurred, and why there were no straight lines; there was a kind of softness, a tenderness. This was exactly the same feeling I had when creating L’Heure Bleue. What changed was not the emotion we feel when looking at a beautiful natural phenomenon like the blue hour, but how I expressed it using the tools I have today.

And the throughline is the iris note.

Exactly. So iris is a very important ingredient in L’Heure Bleue; it’s a blue flower that we reduced in a powder and put in alcohol to create a tincture—that’s this new ingredient I wanted to create. Usually, what I use at Guerlain as an iris quality is an iris butter. The flower needs three years in the ground, an additional three for drying, and after we reduce it in a powder and we make a distillation that is the butter. It’s called the blue gold of perfumery because it’s so, so expensive, precious, and takes so much time.

I think the tincture gives a different iris facet than before because it’s less of a “grandma” iris, but more like a fresh, clean one. I also loved adding Cascalone and vanilla; Cascalone is a note that helps give the scent of the sky, and the vanilla adds sensuality.

What would make L’Heure Bleue so appealing for women?

We love to feel like we smell good in a clean way. This feeling of “I feel fresh, clean. I just smell good. I’m not just perfumed.” What I love about L’Heure Bleue is that you smell this blue-sky accord, which almost smells like laundry. Perfume doesn’t just give you confidence, but it protects you. I love the gesture in the morning when you put your perfume on. It’s armor. It’s going to protect me and envelop me.

Because it’s a very long-lasting perfume, the more you wear it—at night, when you want to meet your boyfriend or girlfriend—the more you smell the drydown. There are also woody notes, like ambroxan, so it’s very skin-like. As a woman creating for a woman, I can’t just be all about seduction. When a man is creating for a woman, it’s all fantasy because he’s not a woman—it’s a seduction story. What I create is about feeling good, your well-being. Bleue femininity is a true femininity.

Blue hour, to me, means that the night is coming, so everything is possible. We can’t really choose what we do during the day if we have our duties. But at night, if you really accept the freedom you have, you can do whatever you want. You can be whatever you want.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.