Beauty

The first thing that catches my eye when Delphine Jelk clicks onto my screen is not Delphine Jelk. It’s the wall behind her: a collision of cobalt, ink and powder, of skies and fabrics and a glossy swipe of blue eyeshadow. “Ah yes, this is my blue mood board,” Jelk says when I confess I’ve been staring past her. “I need images, I need words, I need textures to build my fragrance. So it’s a story that I tell on the mood board and in the bottle at the same time.” The story Jelk is trying to tell with the launch of her new L’Heure Bleue fragrance for Guerlain isn’t so much about the perfume itself as it is the modern retelling of a moment. In 1912, Jacques Guerlain famously crossed the Pont-Neuf one summer evening, was ambushed by the beauty of the Seine and the sky dissolving into one another at twilight, and went home to compose the iconic original fragrance L’Heure Bleue for his wife, Lili.

Jelk has put her name on its successor. No pressure. “It was important for me to keep what I call the soul of L’Heure Bleue 1912,” she affirms. That soul, in her reading, is a triangle of scents—iris, orange flower, vanilla—and she’s generous about the man who assembled it. “I think I would have done the same as what he did. I totally understand why he used those ingredients and the fact that he expressed L’Heure Bleue with so much tenderness, softness, roundness, powderiness.” Then she says the thing that makes my eyebrows shoot up. “This blend, this accord, is for me almost like a very chic marshmallow. And I find that funny, because in 1912 I’m sure he didn’t have that in mind—but it’s what I smell.” For her modern reimagining, Jelk gave herself quite the challenge. “Perfumers create with what they have at their disposal,” she says. “Jacques Guerlain did with what he had at the time, and unfortunately, he didn’t have the ingredients to create the scent of the sky. And that’s what I wanted to do.”

Her key entry point into the pursuit of the sky was Cascalone, a refined descendant of the marine note that soaked the 1980s. “It’s like Calone, but less salty, less oyster-like. Less from the sea. It’s more from the sky.” She wanted altitude, not coastline. “You have this freshness that you can sometimes feel in the mountains, when the air is very pure. So it’s a mix between a sensation and a scent,” she says with the sort of poetic explanation that only the best perfumers can pull off. Jelk goes on to confess that she was also trying to chase another sensation—a shiver. “For me, L’Heure Bleue, it’s the moment of the day when the sun goes down. You have a little chill because it’s getting colder—so you have this physical thrill. And at the same time it’s also an emotional thrill, because at the end of the day, the night is coming, and everything is possible.”

When the available scent ingredients are not enough to perfectly capture the moment Jelk is trying to crystallize into fragrance form, she has the backing of a house that has the wherewithal to make it. “I have this amazing chance at Guerlain to create my own ingredient,” she confirms. The house’s Madagascan vanilla tincture is the famous case; here Jelk wanted the same for iris, Jacques Guerlain’s own anchor and the flower at the heart of the Guerlinade accord. Not the petals but the rhizome, sourced in Italy, then macerated through trials at Guerlain’s Orphin workshop just outside of Paris—a process Jelk calls “crazydelicious,” but entirely worth it. “But so delicious.”

“I took three years to create the perfume and I took three years to create the tincture,” shares Jelk, who worked on both in parallel. The result behaves unlike standard iris butter. “It gives a top note,” says Jelk. “So with this Cascalone blue sky note that I have in the top, the iris is already there.” Beneath it sit Ambroxan, Helvetolide musk, and a vanilla she insists is no dessert. “It’s almost a bit leathery, spicy,” she explains.

And while it is currently a trend in perfume circles for fragrances to be unisex, that is not the intention Jelk has for her L’Heure Bleue. “We love to say today that perfumes are not gendered. This one is gendered. I definitely thought about women when I created it,” she says with feeling. What interests her is that this places her somewhere Jacques Guerlain could never inhabit: what it means to be a woman in the world. “When I talk about true femininity, authenticity, this is not a femininity that you need to scream or shout. That’s what we see a lot today, in perfumery and everywhere. And I didn’t want that, because it’s not L’Heure Bleue, and I think we don’t need it. So we can be strong and free, being soft and tender, and yeah – just us.”

Hence, her L’Heure Bleu is a bit of a rebuttal. “When you go into perfumery today, you have the pink line for women and the blue line for men,” comments Jelk. “But I love this idea of blue for women. And I choose the blue shirt, like the boyfriend blue shirt, because I find it very sexy, of course. But at the same time, I find it so authentic to who we are.”

Jelk’s precise about the space she wants her L’Heure Bleu to take up in the world. “I didn’t want to modernise it, I didn’t want to reinterpret it. It’s really a tribute. And at the same time it really deserved a following, because right now L’Heure Bleue 1912 is forgotten.” As of now, it’s not anymore.