Les Heures de Parfum - XI L'Heure Perdue
Cartier (2015)

I find it hilarious that very few people actually tell you what this smells like. Even perfume website and forum admins seem to have given up. Most people stick to abstraction, which is fair because this perfume is all about abstraction. You only need to look so far as the name: the lost hour. How do you capture lost time in a fragrance? To me, this is less about reflecting upon lost opportunity and more like the feeling you get from amnesia. Mathilde Laurents sticks purely to synthetics for this perfume to hammer home the feeling that something unnatural has happened, something just doesn’t feel right; you’re not alarmed, but something happened and you don’t what, or what time-slot it fell into.

Thanks to big doses of vanillin, ionones, and cinnamon phenyls, you can, if you shut the subjective part of your brain off for a minute, pull some facets of some very familiar characters - but again, just not how you remember them. Maybe this is dementia or Alzheimers, then? Do me a favor, go to your kitchen pantry and pull out some vanilla extract, or vanilla bean paste would be better if you have it. Take a big whiff. Now imagine that vanilla from your pantry stripped of all sugar and the sweet top-soil like earthiness. In the absence of sugar and earthiness, what your mind should be telling you that’s left is the vanilla bean’s actual body - the bitter plant fibers that make the bean and the pigments that give it its color. It will smell like the plant it actually is. What you then have is the vanilla you get in Perdue. Finally, do the same thing for the cinnamon in your pantry. Smell that layer that just hangs on the surface of the cinnamon? It’s a bit peppery, without making you want to sneeze; it’s woody, but not in the way most woods are because in cinnamon it’s extremely dry? Basically you should be smelling the high and airy woody notes of cinnamon and not the deep and earthy notes of cinnamon. Those characteristics you pick up are the phenyls of cinnamon alcohols, cinnamon aldehydes, and woody ionones used in Perdue. Again, imagine you have dementia/Alzheimers to the point where you smell vanilla and cinnamon, you mostly recognize them, but one half of your brain says you don’t recognize them while the other half does. This is Mathilde Laurent’s brilliant trick with Perdue. Et voila, the inspiration for Perdue: something was lost, it’s recognizable, but the uncertainty is unshakable. You’re welcome.

But I can’t leave it there. Being so reductive with a perfume like Perdue is unfair because the tricks of the synthetics are just part of the story. Ms. Laurent’s deft and brilliant blending hand is the other part. How she brings these unnatural and mind-warping characters together is superb. I would love to ask her more about these materials and how she handled them, mainly to understand the perfume’s opening. For context, this perfume is straightforward and monodimensional in the traditional sense; there aren’t clear top, heart, and base notes, and dry downs as such. But something certainly happens in the opening. There is an aldehyde blast that immediately grabs the wearer's attention. They are not the sparkling and shimmering aldehydes of Chanel and others we all know and love. These aldehydes are large and very round, satin beige in color compared to Chanel-aldehyde’s prismatic white, and impenetrable. You’ve seen this effect before on your television, where a film has a frozen frame of an explosion that they rewind to show the explosion folding in on itself. The act of doing this somehow neuters the explosion of all alarm and threat. The large, round, soft, beige aldehydes in the opening of Perdue do just that: explode, stop mid explosion, and fold-in on themselves to the eerie quiet of the perfume.

Perdue will definitely not be for everyone. It doesn’t obey the rules of commercial perfumery. It’s olfactory avant garde art and I can’t thank Mathilde Laurent and Cartier enough for having the cajones to give it to us and to keep making it. It’s brilliant.

I want to turn toward the phenomenon of liminal spaces: abandoned malls, hotel corridors, and empty playgrounds. The absence of human presence in these places is disconcerting. What is a playground if not a place where kids are playing? I get that same feeling of disconcertment when smelling L'Heure Perdue. It's a children's birthday party with no attendees. There is cake frosting. Latex balloons. A bouncy house. Taped gift boxes. Doll heads. There is no one to be found. Yet, I cannot help sniffing my wrist. I'm nostalgic to a fault. I can co-exist with the eeriness of L'Heure Perdue if it means holding onto a figment of simpler times.

I am floored. It slightly reminds me of Cologne Blanche/Bois D'Argent with its milky/powdery/almondy vanilla, and then the main talk of the show - balloons. Yes, it reminds me of balloons you would have at your birthday parties as a kid. This is an odd and unique combo, but a genius one at that. It is challenging, but not in a transgressive way, it walks that line just about right to make you feel something, but never to offend you. It's alien enough to be intriguing, but human enough to feel the warmth and familiarity of it. Just when you think you figured it out, here it is with another shift that will challenge and make you wonder, what is this exactly? magic? it could be...

L'Heure Perdue may likely be one of the most challenging fragrances in my possession, yet I am transfixed by it. I think of vanilla scented rubber erasers; flashbacks to the party balloons of childhood; the smell of my backpack I used in the second grade; pencils and crayons; Vienna wafers for snacks; warm milk on a sick day home from school;musty, dusty old books in a library (a lignin accord?!). It is a geyser of Proustian flashbacks. I am pulled inside out wearing this, thinking of how fleeting childhood is, but how life felt like it took forever each day, and a thousand adventures could occur from breakfast to bedtime.

Now, at age 45, I sit here, wearing this, and I'm wondering what was Mathilde Laurent's true intention for this fragrance, because surely this isn't terribly accessible, it's not beautiful in the conventional sense, and the masses would surely scoff at how bizarre it seems to be. Yet I am smitten by its weirdness, unrelentingly phenolic and almost ammoniac. While its overtones are defiant against the conventions of perfumery, its undertones do reveal the heritage of Guerlain, with glimmers of Jicky-ness and Shalimar-ness in its heart and drydown. Further flashbacks of salty-soft-marzipan Play Doh and Magic Markers surface in the drydown.

This is not for the fragrance novice, the faint of heart, but rather the insatiable adventurer, the nose that so deeply desires uncharted territory, because there is surely nothing else that smells like this. I give it a 10 out of 10.

I hate this scent more than I can say.

Based on the reviews I'd read (especially Luca Turin's), I fully expected to be entranced by this enigmatic Proustian fragrance that would send me back to childhood and mother's milk and babies' heads. And truly for the first few moments, I was captivated by the strangeness and somewhat indescribable nature of L'Heure Perdue. However as time marched on, I began to be increasingly irritated and finally horrified by the purely (and HIGHLY) synthetic nature of the perfume that bloomed and grew and G-R-E-W.

Yes, I know that the perfumer herself has commented on the purely 'artificial' composition of this fragrance, so I really can't complain from that standpoint, but regardless, this stuff smells vile after its glorious evaporated milk opening.

Blechhh.

Heart’s ease. This is vanilla soft as stroking a sleeping baby’s head, the delicate and warm, clean milk-fed skin drawing forth a wellspring of tenderness in anyone coming close enough for a sniff. It’s cloudy like white diffusing in a glass of something clear, it has the powdery aerial not-quite-but-yes floral softness of swaying flocks of mimosa, and it has other not-quite-placeable impressions: a rubbed eraser; a drop of cognac in a gallon of milk; green bananas; the finest flour, gently baked. But why go round the houses when baby’s vanilla will do? Curl up and dream within it.