Besides being of interest in their own right, the new method and the new proof of the known results for the slow passage through Hopf bifurcation points are also of current interest, since the phenomena of delayed passage through bifurcations plays an increasingly important role in the analysis of folded singularities in higher-dimensional fast–slow systems with curves and manifolds of nonhyperbolic points. For some of these problems, it will be useful also to formulate the delayed stability loss results by choosing appropriate contours in the complex time plane to make the singularities nilpotent and then by applying the geometric desingularization method.