Le Labo

Overview

Le Labo was founded in New York in 2006 by Fabrice Penot and Eddie (Edouard) Roschi, both formerly of Armani fragrance, on a presentation concept: fragrances named for their principal material and the number of ingredients, blended to order in the shop, hand-labeled with the customer’s name and the date.

Its commercially decisive release is Santal 33 (2011), a sandalwood composition that became the defining smell of a certain kind of urban interior in the 2010s and one of the most imitated fragrances of the decade.

Founding and early history

Penot and Roschi met while working on Giorgio Armani fragrances. They funded the new house themselves, with help from a few friends, and founded it as an explicit reaction to the mainstream: no marketing narrative, no flankers, no advertising, and a laboratory aesthetic in place of luxury packaging.

The naming convention — Rose 31, Santal 33, Another 13 — signals a material and an ingredient count, and the blending-to-order ritual signals freshness. Both are presentation decisions rather than compositional ones, and both were extremely effective.

The first shop opened in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood. The house grew quickly through its own boutiques and through a City Exclusives series — one fragrance per city, such as Tubéreuse 40 for New York — that made scarcity part of the proposition.

House style

The house style is single-material framing over contemporary synthetic bases. A Le Labo composition typically foregrounds one recognizable note and builds it on the modern woody-amber palette — Iso E Super, Ambroxan, Cashmeran, Sandalore, musks.

Santal 33 is the type case and a genuinely good composition: sandalwood and cedar with cardamom, violet, iris and a leather accord — dry, smoky, leathery-creamy, unusually diffusive, and immediately identifiable. Its ubiquity is the reason it is now frequently described as boring, which is a compliment paid badly.

The perfume had an unusual route to market. Voelkl first proposed the sandalwood accord as a personal fragrance for the 2006 launch; the founders instead made it into the Santal 26 candle and a room spray, and only after the candle had built a following did they ask him to adapt it into a wearable perfume, released as Santal 33 in 2011.

The recurring criticism is that the ingredient-count naming implies a compositional austerity the fragrances do not have, and that the house’s laboratory framing is as much a costume as the luxury packaging it replaced.

Key fragrances

Perfumers

The house commissions externally and credits its perfumers, in the manner Frédéric Malle established: Frank Voelkl, Daphné Bugey, Nathalie Lorson, Annick Menardo, Michel Almairac, Mark Buxton, Alberto Morillas and Maurice Roucel.

Voelkl is the most significant — Santal 33, and before it the Santal 26 candle — and Bugey wrote two of the 2006 launch scents, Rose 31 and Bergamote 22; the house’s reliance on the contemporary synthetic palette reflects the working practice of the composition houses it commissions from rather than any distinctive house method.

Ownership and business history

Le Labo was acquired by the Estée Lauder Companies in late 2014, eight years after founding and in the same year Lauder bought Frédéric Malle. Before the sale it had grown without outside investors, on the founders’ own money and a small circle of friends.

Under Lauder ownership distribution has expanded very substantially: the house now has dozens of its own boutiques worldwide and counters in department stores across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The blending-to-order ritual has been maintained as a retail feature.

The expansion is the standing criticism: a house whose proposition was scarcity and laboratory intimacy is now a global Lauder brand, and the tension between those two things is unresolved.

Present position

Le Labo today is a large premium brand inside the Estée Lauder Companies, a group listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with Santal 33 as its anchor, a core catalogue of just under twenty fragrances, the City Exclusives, and a home line of candles and room sprays that began with Santal 26.

Santal 33 remains the house’s signature, and its imitators — across mainstream and niche alike — are the clearest measure of its influence.

Historical assessment

The house’s contribution is presentational rather than compositional, and it should be assessed as such: Le Labo established the visual and verbal language that most new fragrance brands now adopt, and it did so more effectively than anyone.

Santal 33 is a genuinely significant fragrance and the exception to that framing. Beyond it the catalogue is good rather than important, and the ingredient-count conceit does not survive scrutiny. Both facts belong in an honest account.

From the Fragrance Archive

Fragrance Help profiles of individual Le Labo fragrances.

Sources