Mitsouko was born in 1919 at Guerlain, composed by Jacques Guerlain, who took its name from the heroine of La Bataille, a novel by Claude Farrère. A fruity chypre, it pairs a synthetic peach with jasmine and May rose over a base of moss, patchouli, vetiver and spices. Thierry Wasser reworked it in 2013; the eau de parfum is sold in the 1912 “inverted heart” bottle.
The “inverted heart” bottle, designed in 1912 for L’Heure Bleue, is adorned with Art Nouveau scrolls; its hollow stopper forms a heart.
Guerlain now attributes this bottle to Raymond Guerlain and dates it to 1912. Scrolls characteristic of Art Nouveau enhance the glass, and the stopper shaped like a hollow heart was, according to the house, considered a technical feat in its day.
Older Guerlain texts credited Georges Chevalier with the design, an attribution still visible on some Guerlain pages, such as the Singapore one. The house’s current texts in Europe name Raymond Guerlain.
According to Elena Vosnaki, who draws on the Guerlain archives, Mitsouko took over the bottle of L’Heure Bleue, released in 1912, in 1919 because of wartime shortages. The design has endured, and both the eau de parfum and the eau de toilette still use it.
Vosnaki and Ida Meister mention other presentations: an amphora and a quatrefoil bottle for the extrait, and the montre bottles of the eau de Cologne, with a round mint-green label, sold from the 1950s to the 1970s.