One of my favorite ongoing collections is that being done by Mathilde Laurent, the in-house perfumer for Cartier. It is called the Les Heures de Cartier and in what will be an eventual 13-fragrance collection the ninth entry has just been released. Mme Laurent is not going in order and she is skipping around the clockface as she releases each one. This one represents II and is called L’Heure Convoiteé (The Coveted Hour). All of the fragrances have been sort of vintage in feel but with a modern aesthetic as Mme Laurent looks to the past for inspiration and then adds her own creativity to it to make something very interesting.
The press materials describe the fragrance this way:
“L'Heure Convoiteé, the second hour, it is time to redden lips, to make the fabrics rustle, to make the backbone tremble and to blush the cheekbones. It is the hour of the lovers parade. A fragrance which recalls the smell of a theatre box, a stage, a lipstick.”
After having worn this if Mme Laurent had named this L’Heure Rouge it would also be apt as this iris and carnation fragrance reminds me of the smell of my grandmother’s lipstick in her cosmetics case. That kind of evocation keeps L’Heure Convoiteé fixed firmly in the past and there is little modernism present this time around. That makes this L’Heure a little different.
L’Heure Convoitee is truly a simple construction of three main notes with a tiny drop of a fourth. The first note is iris and it is iris in its most powdery form. It is also iris in an intensely powdery form. My favorite iris notes are where the powder quotient is attenuated. In L’Heure Convoiteé it is amplified up to extreme, almost uncomfortable, levels; for me. What saves this from being unappealing is the carnation in the heart. The clove-like aspect of carnation makes its appearance first and it goes a long way to cutting the powdery quality. The more floral aspects of carnation come along, a beat later, and it is here where this fragrance resembles the smell of a vintage cosmetics bag. If you like lipstick fragrances this is when L’Heure Convoiteé will come alive for you. The base notes are sandalwood kept sweet with a tiny bit of vanilla so that it doesn’t seem like an abrupt transition to the final stage of development.
L’Heure Convoiteé has excellent longevity and extreme sillage. People will know you’re wearing this.
For my tastes L’Heure Convoiteé is the first of this series that I don’t covet because it goes to places which are not my favorite in perfume. When I read the press release I thought to myself if anyone could get me to love a lipstick fragrance it would be Mme Laurent. Had she chosen to modernize a bit she might have made me a convert but by sticking solely to a vintage architecture I found it hard to embrace. If you like powdery lipstick-like fragrances this is as good as these kind of perfumes get. I am going to wait patiently for the clock to strike a different number.
Disclosure: This review was based on a sample purchased from The Perfumed Court.
–Mark Behnke, Managing Editor