Le Labo and the Business of Slow Perfume

The first Le Labo shop opened at 233 Elizabeth Street in Nolita, New York, after Fabrice Penot and Eddie Roschi launched the brand in 2006. It looked less like a perfume counter than a working lab. You picked a scent, and they mixed it while you watched.

A lab on Elizabeth Street

Penot and Roschi came out of the big fragrance business, and they built Le Labo as a reaction against it. Mainstream perfume in the mid-2000s ran on celebrity faces, glossy campaigns and bottles filled long before anyone bought them. Le Labo called its idea slow perfumery. The final bottle was compounded to order in the shop, then sealed and labeled by hand.

That ritual is still the brand's signature move. A staff member blends the scent behind a glass counter in a few minutes, and the label can carry your name or a short message. The date it was made goes on the label too. It is a small piece of theater, but it changes how a purchase feels. You are not taking a bottle off a pile. You are watching one get made.

The setting borrowed from the lab and the workshop at a time when most luxury retail was polished marble. The same instinct shaped Aesop's one-off shops in Melbourne and beyond, which we cover in our history of Aesop and its apothecary design. Both brands figured out early that the space could carry the story, so the advertising didn't have to.

What do the numbers mean?

Every Le Labo name follows the same formula. The word is the main note, and the number is the count of ingredients in the formula. Rose 31 contains 31 materials. Santal 33 contains 33, with sandalwood as the lead. Vetiver 46, Thé Noir 29 and Bergamote 22 work the same way.

It is a clever piece of branding because it sounds technical while telling you almost nothing about what the perfume smells like. Rose 31 is not a pretty rose. Bergamote 22 is not a classic citrus cologne in the Farina tradition we trace in our history of Eau de Cologne. The numbers turn each bottle into a formula on a lab sheet, and that coolness is the point. It also makes the shelf easy to remember. Stand in front of a row of identical bottles and you will still recall the one you liked by its number, the way sneaker people remember a colorway code.

One name breaks the rule. Another 13 began in 2010 as a commission for AnOther Magazine, and the name comes from the magazine rather than a raw material.

The Santal problem

Santal 33 started as a candle. The founders had perfumer Frank Voelkl create a sandalwood scent called Santal 26 for candles and a room spray, and customers kept asking for something they could wear. The personal fragrance took two years and hundreds of prototypes before it launched in 2011 as Santal 33. Its notes include sandalwood, cardamom, iris, violet, cedar and leather.

What followed is the strangest success story in modern niche fragrance. Santal 33 became the smell of a certain kind of New York, worn in bars, on subway platforms and by more than a few celebrities. The candle got its own pop culture moment when Beyoncé's 2016 visual album Lemonade showed two Santal 26 candles burning in the Sandcastles sequence.

Ubiquity has a cost. The more people wore Santal 33, the less it said about any one of them. Some longtime wearers started to complain that it had lost the distinctiveness that drew them to it. If you want a scent that works harder for you, our guide on how to build a fragrance wardrobe argues for owning a few bottles with clear jobs instead of one signature everyone else already wears.

City Exclusives and the Estée Lauder era

In 2014 the Estée Lauder Companies agreed to buy Le Labo, a deal WWD reported at around 60 million dollars. Industry coverage at the time listed freestanding stores in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Corporate money pushed the brand into more cities and onto more department store counters, and that reach is what turned Santal 33 from cult object to background noise.

The City Exclusives are Le Labo's answer to that reach. Each one is tied to a single city and, outside an annual event each September, sold only there. Gaiac 10 belongs to Tokyo. Tubereuse 40 belongs to New York. Poivre 23 is London's and Vanille 44 is Paris's. The brand's Wikipedia entry lists the rest, from Aldehyde 44 for Dallas to Osmanthus 19 for Kyoto. It is scarcity by geography, and it works for the same reason a Supreme drop works. You have to be there, or know someone who was.

The Elizabeth Street address still anchors the story, a few blocks from the shops in our SoHo streetwear guide. For more on scent, browse the grooming section and our fragrance hub. And if you do buy a bottle, read the label before you peel the box open. If you asked for a name, it is printed there for one bottle only.