Night Flight: The mystery envelops the sensualities of Jacques Guerlain’s perfume
By creating Vol de Nuit in 1933, Jacques Guerlain offered a vibrant and dark, animal and outrageously feminine fragrance to reckless and passionate dreamers who prided themselves on crazy exotic rides.
A Night Flight in homage to the men and women who venture into distant lands
The 1930s, the Roaring Twenties, saw the appearance of adventurers of a new kind: aviators. Determined to connect the different points of the Globe at lightning speed, the men and women of the Aéropostale risk losing their lives on each new adventure. Yet nothing stops them, like the daring aviator and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
A great friend of Jacques Guerlain, Saint-Exupéry released a magnificent novel, Vol de Nuit, recounting the fantastic epics by plane of River, courageous commander of a patrol of airmen with which he tried to impose the famous night flights for beat the speed of postal cars. Jacques Guerlain, fascinated by the courage and bravery of his friend’s characters, decided to pay tribute to these courageous anonymous heroes who did not hesitate for a second in the face of danger by creating the Vol de Nuit perfume in 1933.
< p> Vol de Nuit, the fascinating oriental of Guerlain, will therefore be for its various advertisements accompanied by mysterious maritime spaces or lost mountains but always with the same symbol of the nocturnal bird, drawn in the style of an airplane, enthroned in the above these arid lands. Because “There the mists wandered, their mystery and their perfume. So Night Flight was created” Guerlain.
When Night Flight asserts itself, women hide …
“Rare, enigmatic , daring ”according to Guerlain, the sparkling Vol de Nuit appeals to women looking for a dry woody chypre, a deep and flowery oriental. But also all those who are looking for both a disturbing fragrance and also a little” boyish “. Just like this beautiful bottle made by Baccarat which highlights the delicate design of the smoked bottle. It is intended to represent an airplane propeller in motion, flanked by a metal plug like a mechanical part enthroned on the steel wings. Very avant-garde by its mixture of metal and glass, Vol de Nuit approaches Art Deco in perfumery with a disturbing masculinity.
Vol de Nuit is a lively, complex fragrance that never ceases to amaze both with its usually masculine galbanum notes and its floral and woody facets. The top notes composed of bergamot, lemon and mandar in are fresh and tangy to better penetrate the floral cocktail that pierces the heart. Without forgetting the addition of galbanum, associated with petitgrain, to better “pick” us with their raspy and very green facets. Then comes the fireworks display of precious flowers: violet, carnation, jasmine, rose, gentian, daffodil and orange blossom. Pure bucolic femininity that will be totally transfigured by a dry and woody Guerlinade in the background, switching between powerful animal notes and typically “Guerlain” notes of vanilla,
“Vol de Nuit is the scent of women who risk it all for everything. It is no coincidence that it is and has been worn by women of power and entertainment personalities. »Says Sylvaine Delacourte, famous Guerlain nose. Inimitable, surprising and assertive, Vol de Nuit is suitable for both passionate adventurers and elegant ladies who particularly love the strength of its floral animal trail, perfect with furs as was the fashion of the time …
Since the creation of the Guerlain house in the 19th century, Guerlain perfumers have never ceased to offer scented marvels that shake up the classics to offer something new. Jacques Guerlain, the house’s perfumer in the 20th century and grandson of its founder, was certainly one of the most prolific and innovative creators. Man loves the arts and exotic travel, each of his perfumes will be imbued with them. Night Flight, composed in 1933, will be an ode to this new adventure that is aviation but also certainly one of its most successful perfumes …
Vol de Nuit, Jacques Guerlain’s masterful work in homage to the steel wings of Saint-Exupéry
The specificity of the Guerlain perfume house, in addition to its exceptional longevity and global success, is to have been able to transmit the love of the creation of the scent of descendants by descendants for many decades. Pierre-François-Pascal Guerlain opened the first Guerlain boutique in 1828, then Aimé Guerlain and finally Jacques Guerlain each took up this torch while continuing to innovate ever more, to carry Guerlain values ever higher.
If each Guerlain descendant knew how to bring his personal touch to the prestigious house, Jacques Guerlain was particularly intended to offer innovative and very exotic fragrances inspired for the most part by his love for elsewhere, elsewhere in literature or an art. we trips. Vol de Nuit, composed by him in 1933, so well represents Jacques Guerlain’s taste for elsewhere.
Vol de Nuit was designed to pay tribute to the first flights by plane as well as to the perfumer’s friend, the famous aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In the end, Vol de Nuit would be one of the darkest and most complex perfumes of the perfumer dedicated to rendering in fragrance (just as the Blue Hour had done before by announcing the beginnings of the war) all the turpitudes to which the pioneers aviation should be expected.
“His very assertive personality is not easily accessible. To understand it, you must have a certain olfactory heritage. I like to say that to experience Vol de Nuit, you have to sleep with it! »Sylviane Delacourte about Vol de Nuit, Guerlain.
Chiaroscuro accords for a complex and magnificent Vol de Nuit fragrance
Jacques Guerlain’s fragrances are much more than magnificent scents, they whisper stories to us. For Vol de Nuit it is about the dangerous and risky adventures of the man facing the machine, for L’Heure Bleue the beginnings of a world which goes to war and finally for Mitsouko the outbursts of passion of a condemned woman. . Strong stories that make these three fragrances often considered “sister fragrances”.
Night Flight opens with intense and hesperidic freshness as if we were flying away with the steel giant of the sky adventurers. For the heart, the femininity of Vol de Nuit wins us over with beautiful floral notes of daffodils, jasmine and orange blossom. But the galbanum announces much darker plant weather to better transport us to the intense and sensual wooded depths of this extraordinary Night Flight.
“Courageous, the NIGHT FLIGHT perfume is too; it is the scent of risk, of dangerous play, full of daring, the scent of charismatic women. “Sylvaine Delacourte for Guerlain’s Vol de Nuit.
Woody Green