Après L'Ondée to L'Eau d'Hiver: What's in a Tribute?

Après L'Ondée Dining Gown, designed by De Worth
and painted by A. Lorenzi from Porterfield's Fine Art


Sillage commonly means the trail of scent left in the air by a perfumed body. Guerlain scents are known for their potent sillage. In addition to their infamous sillage, Guerlain’s perfumes have had such a potent influence on the art of perfumery that there is at least one explicit tribute. Such a tribute tells a lot about how the evolution of perfumery since 1906.

Après L'Ondée (1906) by Jacques Guerlain calls into question my assertion that virtual reality perfume is a contemporary innovation. Yet the Guerlain fragrance is marked by a nostalgia lacking in its tribute, L'Eau d'Hiver (2003).
Après L'Ondée is a hundred year old baroque masterpiece meant to evoke the scent and texture of the air after a heavy summer shower. The Guerlain website says that Après L'Ondée is inspired by “the fragrant picture of a rural landscape bathed in sunshine after the rain.”

Top notes of aniseed, lemon and neroli pierce the senses with a sense of sharpness and wetness. Yet top notes are fleeting; we are splashed with a sweet summer rain. Because perfume literally enters the nose and the inside of the body, it is difficult to remain separate from the work. When I encounter perfume I lose the ability to be objective.

I question whether a training in smell is ever anything but self delusion, because getting a handle on scent is like trying to prove a criminal case; an experiment in creative non-fiction. The training in smell involves a sort of interpolation where one smells contrasting materials to understand the differences and similarities as well as the relationship between notes. Most non-perfumers rely on the perfume ad copy to interpret what they are smelling, when in reality perfumes are complex chemical cocktails that may not contain any of the ingredients they so artfully represent.

That said, there is a logic to Après L'Ondée’s composition that even the layperson can grasp. A cupid’s arrow of cassia and carnation pierces Après L'Ondée’s powdery pastille violet heart. Cassia is a spicy bark that is often called Chinese Cinnamon. The carnation said to exist in the scent is bright, not overbearing, with its zingy clove-like quality. Heart notes also include mimosa and sandalwood.

Most essential to the fantasy here is the scent’s combination of iris root, vanilla, benzoin, and bittersweet heliotrope. This accord is comforting and staid. A place to dwell where things won’t change too quickly.


Iris, the star of the fragrance, is the mythical beast of smells. It is a most beloved scent and natural materials related to the iris cost a fortune. Après L'Ondée is iris at its most nostalgic. Even though this perfume emerged at the beginning of the 20th century when smoke stacks and railroad trains had begun to dot the countryside and enter the work of Post-Impressionist painters, this scent, with its flacon designed to look like a woven straw flower basket, harks back to a pre-industrial innocence.

In support of this nostalgic fantasy, this iris is not root-like or carroty in the least. It smells like a flower garden more than a vegetable garden, putting Iris Silver Mist by Roucel at the other end of the spectrum of iris scents.

One hundred years later, it is interesting to see how perfumers and their customers receive a perfume like Après L'Ondée. It is especially fascinating to note that a contemporary perfumer made a perfume in homage to Après L'Ondée.

In Chandler Burr’s interview with Jean-Claude Ellena for the New Yorker, March 14, 2005, Ellena describes his homage to Après L'Ondée:

“The problem—well, you can’t say there’s a problem with Après l’Ondée—but, bon, voilà, it is too opulent. Guerlain is baroque: put this in, and this, and this.” On the other hand, he said admiringly, the Guerlain scent had a marvellous sillage—the olfactory wake that trails behind a wearer of perfume. Someone once defined sillage to me, rather metaphysically, as the sense of a person being present in the room after she has left. Creating a sillage that is potent but not overpowering is tricky. With L’Eau d’Hiver, Ellena said, he wanted to pay homage to the Guerlain scent’s sillage—“but in enlightened form.” He selected elements from Après l’Ondée that were “soft, comfortable, light.”

The article notes that part of Ellena’s mastery and style as a perfumer is in using relatively few ingredients to create a more streamlined effect than traditional Guerlain style. For Ellena to call L’Eau d”Hiver the “enlightened form” of Après L'Ondée is revealing. It could mean that advances in synthetics enable fewer ingredients to smell like a panoply of notes.

Yet there is also a sense that Ellena revised Après L'Ondée’s baroque style of 1906 to make the scent more wearable for a modern audience. Ellena’s homage practices its own contemporary art. Personally, I am glad that I don’t have to choose between the two perfumes, because they say very different things to me. They evoke the different times in which they were composed. Surely that has a lot to do with the chemical materials and methods available as well as the changes in the way people live.

I know there are droves of perfume lovers out there who love to wear Après L'Ondée today and an equal amount of perfume fanatics rave over L’Eau d’Hiver. Rather than a case of ‘out with the old in with the new,’ the original and its tribute happily coexist.


Photo of Obleas de Cajeta, Caramel Wafers

Chandler Burr says L’Eau D’Hiver smells of “ground white pepper and cold seawater, with a touch of fresh crab.” I must admit I find this description both comical and puzzling, but I like the implied weirdness. When I wear L’Eau d’Hiver, I am reminded of a Mexican caramel disk-shaped candy with powdered shell made to look like a communion wafer, the oblea. Noses are so different from person to person, you wonder if scent is all in the imagination.

For a thorough and poetic review of L’Eau d’Hiver, see Bois de Jasmin’s post of January 10, 2006.

Today’s exuberant claim: Perfume not only creates virtual realities, it effects time travel.

Photograph, Clocks in Paris by Michael Going from www.goinggallery.com