Le Labo

History of the house

Le Labo was founded in 2006 in New York (United States) by Fabrice Penot and Edouard Roschi, two French former perfumery executives based in the United States. The pair had resigned from Giorgio Armani Beauty the year before, where Penot oversaw the development of niche Armani brands and one of the group's largest franchises, Acqua di Gio, while Roschi managed the Emporio Armani fragrance line. Their first studio opened in the Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan, in a boutique with a deliberate laboratory aesthetic: raw wood shelving, precision scales, handwritten dated and numbered labels (Business of Fashion profile of Edouard Roschi, Wikipedia, accessed 2026-05-22).

The editorial concept was distinctive from day one. Each perfume carries the name of a dominant material followed by a number indicating the count of materials in the formula. Rose 31 names a rose composed with 31 materials, Bergamote 22 a bergamot built on 22 materials, Santal 33 a sandalwood structured around 33 materials. This rational nomenclature, borrowed from pharmaceutical chemistry codes, broke with the evocative naming codes of traditional French perfumery. The boutique itself became the editorial gesture: the fragrance is freshly compounded by hand at the moment of purchase, the customer's name is written on the label, and the bottle is sealed in front of the buyer (Wikipedia, Now Smell This, fashionista.com interview with Fabrice Penot, accessed 2026-05-22).

The house also pioneered a geographic scarcity strategy with its City Exclusives program. Each large city received its own composition, sold only in the local boutique: Vanille 44 for Paris, Tubereuse 40 for New York, Limette 37 for San Francisco, Poivre 23 for London. The strategy created a sense of pilgrimage around the brand and reshaped the codes of niche distribution during the 2010s. Le Labo expanded its global retail network gradually, from Nolita to Tokyo, Hong Kong, London and Paris (Wikipedia, Le Labo Fragrances official site, accessed 2026-05-22).

In 2014, The Estee Lauder Companies acquired Le Labo for an undisclosed amount publicly estimated around 60 million US dollars, with the deal closing in November 2014. The acquisition fit the Estee Lauder strategy of building a premium niche fragrance portfolio, alongside Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle acquired the same year. The founders publicly committed to maintaining the apothecary aesthetic and editorial autonomy of the house, with day-to-day creative direction kept in their hands (Estee Lauder press release November 2014, Premium Beauty News, COSSMA).

The post-acquisition decade has been defined by Santal 33, launched in 2011 and composed by Frank Voelkl at Firmenich. A creamy radiant woody fragrance built on a high proportion of Iso E Super, the perfume became viral on Instagram from 2015 and on TikTok during the early 2020s. International press routinely cites Santal 33 among the most recognizable niche perfumes of the decade, and the composition has been the source of dozens of commercial dupes and reinterpretations (Wikipedia article on Santal 33, Fragrantica designer page, accessed 2026-05-22).

Notable perfumes

The Le Labo catalogue brings together around thirty core compositions, with nine historical pillars launched between 2006 and the early 2020s. The following nine releases are independently documented on Fragrantica, Parfumo and Basenotes, with consistent attribution and launch year across the three sources.

Santal 33 (2011) remains the cult composition of the house: a creamy radiant woody fragrance built around sandalwood, Virginia cedar, cardamom, leather, papyrus, iris, violet and an ambery base, with Iso E Super reported to make up the majority of the formula. Rose 31 (2006) reframes rose as a woody spicy material rather than a feminine floral, with cumin, vetiver and oud in the structure. Bergamote 22 (2006) opens on a luminous bergamot grapefruit accord that settles into vetiver, cedar and amber. Patchouli 24 (2006) by Annick Menardo signs the most polarizing composition of the house: a smoky birch leather phenolic accord that recalls the smell of bonfire and tanning leather. Tonka 25 (2020) closes the historical core with a warm gourmand tonka reading (Fragrantica, Parfumo, Basenotes, accessed 2026-05-22).

Olfactive signature

Le Labo built its signature around an apothecary aesthetic: rational nomenclature, handwritten dated and numbered labels, raw wood shelving, in-store hand blending at the time of purchase. The visual signature is paired with a more diffuse olfactive identity that favors densely material compositions structured around a single declared ingredient. The house resists the idea of a uniform olfactive signature: each composition is read as an autonomous study of one material (lelabofragrances.com About page, Now Smell This editorial coverage, accessed 2026-05-22).

Three stylistic axes nonetheless emerge across the catalogue. The first is the radiant woody axis, built on Iso E Super and clean cedar woods, exemplified by Santal 33 (2011) and The Noir 29 (2015). The second is the spiced floral axis, which reframes flowers as material objects rather than romantic figures, illustrated by Rose 31 (2006) and Lys 41 (2014). The third is the smoky aromatic axis, less frequent and more polarizing, anchored by Patchouli 24 (2006) and its birch leather phenolic accord.

The composer-editor model structures the production. Le Labo commissions external perfumers from the major fragrance houses, including Frank Voelkl at Firmenich for Santal 33 and The Noir 29, Daphne Bugey at Firmenich for Rose 31, Bergamote 22 and Lys 41, Annick Menardo for Patchouli 24, and Mark Buxton for Vetiver 46. The setup is comparable to the Editions de Parfums Frederic Malle editorial model, with the brand acting as creative editor rather than in-house composer. This authorial transparency, with the perfumer named on the label, became one of the recognized markers of contemporary niche perfumery.

We wanted each bottle to look like it had been prepared for you, in your name. Not a product, an object.

Key characteristics

Frequently asked questions

See also