Guerlain, Apres L’Ondee
Is there any flower in the world with a name more beautiful than heliotrope? The Greek roots of the nomenclature aren’t too hard to divine: you have helios for the sun, and trepin, which means “to turn,” and it is all quite literal. This flower, most commonly purple and clustered like a day-after bruise, is in a romantic relationship with sunlight from the moment it blooms. It seeks out Vitamin D like a hog looking for truffles, craning its neck, straining its stems. Searching, searching. Of course, the flower’s name being Greek in origin, it is attached to a myth that is both tragic and desperate; this is the story of Clytie, the comely water nymph, one of the three-thousand daughters of Oceanus, the father of the sea but also maybe of everything else. Sometimes, in Greek mythology, Oceanus takes the form of the sea god Titan, but sometimes he is just the ocean itself, the salty slosh encircling the world, the original amniotic fluid. His daughters, the Oceanids, had a mother (Oceanus’ sister Tethys) but she wasn’t really capable of nursing three thousand children; she lost track of a few along the way. The mission of the nymphs was to blanket the world, to spread out far and wide providing women’s labor in its most distant corners; the Oceanids rarely had their own epic adventures. Instead they became an unpaid daycare force, looking after the children of Gods along the banks of rivers, ensuring that the little ones didn’t slip under the current. They became wives, and lovers, and mothers; whorls on expansive family trees. Individual triumph was not in the stars for the water nymphs; so many of them were born to be eyeless anemones, crawling along the seabed looking for bigger stories to suction themselves to in service.
Clytie had a different ambition for herself, and this being Greek mythology, you know that she was punished for it. She fell in love with Helios, the sun god himself, the white hot pulsating dogstar of the mythological marquee. It was like falling for Mick Jagger. Ill-advised, doomed to end in embarrassment, or worse. What made Clytie’s crush so dangerous, for Helios and for herself, is that she was ruthlessly petty. When Helios took up with her sister nymph Leucothoe, the “white goddess,” who some believed to be made out of blanched seasalt, Clytie took it upon herself to go nuclear. She told Leucothoe’s father, Orchamus, the King of Assyria, about the fact that his daughter was sleeping with the sun god. Perhaps Clytie didn’t know it at the time, or maybe she did and she was a sociopath, but Leucothoe wasn’t so much in love with Helios as being routinely sexually assaulted by him; Helios would sneak into her bedroom in disguise and rape her against her will. Instead of saving her sister from the brutality of a man, Clytie wanted the violence for herself; she wanted to feel the sunlight on her face, even if it burned and blistered her skin. Her story is one of selling out a woman in peril to get closer to a man in power, and so it seems incredibly modern to me, and incredibly sad. Orchamus ordered Leucothoe to be buried alive (totally chill reaction from a dad, totally normal) and after she suffocated, Helios turned her body into the frankincense tree. This is all that is left of her -- according to Ovid anyway -- a tree that is most valuable for the resin that leaks out of it, a plant most prized for its prolific tearducts.
As most women who sell out other women find out soon enough, no man will ever be worth the pain. Helios didn’t care that Clytie played executioner to win his love; if anything he found this a pathetic act of clinginess. But Clytie couldn’t take a hint; she was already too far in. She had more or less committed manslaughter; she had to make it all mean something. So she stripped naked and sat on a rock, facing the sun, for nine days and nine nights, not eating or sleeping. Some say she went mad out there, dehydrated and desperate. On the morning of the tenth day, her body evaporated. She too became a plant, but not a noble tree; instead she became a flat flowering bush, the diminutive heliotrope (also called turnsole), that thrives on craggy hillsides. There is something pitiful about the heliotrope, that grows wherever it can find a toehold but never attains majesty. Its only consistent behavior is that it chases the sun, turning its flowerheads throughout the day so that it can always be pining after a distant God, a man who will never love it back with such single-minded devotion.
Heliotrope flowers tend to only sigh off their scent through enfleurage, the process of dipping blossoms in tallow or other animal fat until they finally relent and excrete their oils in a dying gasp. You wouldn’t know it from walking past a turnsole bush, but the smell they leave behind is stunning; their tiny heads are filled with fragrance. And nothing else really compares; they have a bit of the talcy powdery quality of violets, and a bit of the soapy cleanliness of cotton blossoms, but they also have a decidedly almond undertone, like the sweet orgeat syrup that street vendors in Italy glug into soda water. This is what heliotrope is, in its very essence: beauty gone nutty, a woman whose neediness drove her to the very edge.
Unfortunately, heliotropin, the distilled material from the flowers, has been appearing less and less in fragrances after the IFRA regulations of the 1980s -- it is a bit toxic, after all; it poisons the blood a little bit. So you know, wear it at your own risk. But if you can get your hands on a sample of original Guerlain Apres L’Ondee, which is the queen of heliotrope fragrances (undercut with violets and musk), I really encourage it, as it is an overwhelming experience. Smelling vintage Apres is the only time I have ever cried upon inhaling a perfume. They have re-issued it, and it is almost the same, but not quite, though still worth getting your hands on. And as clouds clear, more and more, as the grey spring turns to heliocentric summer, remember this: don’t betray your people, even for a moment in the sun.
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