In Beauty Freak, a column for Highsnobiety, Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.
If you ask anyone what New York City smells like, the most resounding answers usually involve piss, weed, smoke, garbage: all signature odors of the greatest city in the world. Ask anyone below Houston Street, though, and there’s a high likelihood the answer will involve a fragrance from Le Labo.
In the 20 years it has been in business, the brand’s scents have come to represent more than the sum of their musky, sandalwood-y, and fig-forward parts. They denote a certain type of person: at one point distinctively downtown (young, cool), then a striver for cultural cache, and these days someone a bit basic who makes a concerted effort to appear cultured.
The Le Labo-ification of New York City was a bit of a fluke. When the brand launched in 2006, founders Fabrice Penot and Eddie Rorschi gifted a whole batch of their Santal 26-scented candles to Jane Larkworthy, then a beauty editor at W Magazine. Larkworthy was getting married, and the candles were the perfect party favors for her fashionable guests, many of whom would later visit the Le Labo store to restock.
Then, Gramercy Park Hotel ordered a run of similar custom scented candles for its lobby, which also sent their guests to Le Labo seeking Santal. With so many people begging for a wearable version, Penot and Roschi enlisted the help of perfumer Frank Volkl to create an eau de parfum of Santal, landing on a version with seven more ingredients than the candle, hence the 33.
From 2011 on, New York City wouldn’t smell the same — or rather, it would, just in a very specific way. The brand also created a custom scent for 1Hotels, as well as The Edition hotels, based on its Thé Noir 29. As of this year, Le Labo is stocked in every Equinox locker room. It has garnered so much cultural significance that it became the first — if not, then at least the most widely recognized — fragrance meme. It has inspired songs. There’s even an “overheard at Le Labo” Instagram account, cataloging conversation snippets from acolytes.
There’s a reason Le Labo took off. The brand’s aesthetic was a perfect match for the 2010s, calling to mind brass hardware, vintage woodworked furniture, Edison bulbs and subway tile. Shopping at Le Labo wasn’t as intimidating as buying at a perfume boutique or a department store counter. Plus, the branding made genderless fragrance feel approachable and modern. Every bottle purchased was filled on-site and came with a custom label. In the early days of Valencia-filtered Instagram posting, people loved that shit.
Fragrance had always been a status symbol — a way to signal your taste by smelling like a luxury brand. But Le Labo’s founders had just the opposite in mind. There was no oversexed marketing, and there were no flashy celebrity-backed campaigns. Johnny Depp was not strolling into the middle of the desert alongside an AI-generated mountain lion to advertise Dior Sauvage. Le Labo’s allure was in its quality materials blended and bottled before your eyes (le labo, after all, is French for “the lab”). And, sure, the air of IYKYK was like catnip for early adopters.
The fragrances themselves, priced at $240 for 50mL, offered modern, understated profiles with a focus on raw materials blended in uncomplicated ways. Santal 33 is what many perfume personas refer to as a “skin scent” — one that wears close to the body. Thé Noir 29 and Another 13 are equally popular; when I asked a “soul” (Le Labo’s term for its sales staff) at the Williamsburg shop which scents sold best, he pointed to those three on a central display.
Over time, Le Labo’s lore began to coalesce into a certain Type. Ask someone what one of their scents actually smells like, and they’ll likely describe: a colleague who exclusively wears Japanese denim, or a “life coach” they met on Raya who ghosted after asking to split the bill. Asia, a graphic designer, described a former situationship who wore Thé Noir. He smelled “earthy and musky,” she said. “The first time I went to his apartment, I was hit by a wall of that scent.”
“It smelled like a man who has the optics of his life together,” she added. “Someone who’s fit because he goes bouldering on the weekends and rides a fixie, who has a high-paying job but pays too much in rent for a too-small apartment.”
A trend may not die outright the moment you put a name — or a type of person — to it. But its meaning starts to connote something beyond its make. Rather than a genuine expression of personal taste, Le Labo’s sillage started to signal mass-market buy-in. It didn’t help that Estée Lauder bought La Labo for $60 million in 2014, aggressively expanding its global footprint. Its founders themselves acknowledged the drawbacks. “When we have been wearing a special scent like Santal 33 for a while, having discovered it before everyone else, and then we start smelling it on other people, we feel like we have been stripped of a part of our identity,” Penot told Vogue in 2020.
These days, when someone walks into Lovely Day, a Thai restaurant on Elizabeth Street, doused in Thé Noir 29, “the whole restaurant immediately squirms,” Laura Reilly’s friend Emilio, who works there, told Magasin in November.
But our present-day eye-rolling forgets the fact that, for a time, Le Labo was stylish — a symbol of all the effort it takes, and all the money it costs, to look so undone. That was kind of the MO of the 2010s: coolness was defined by what it wasn’t, rather than by what it was. I’m sure that early devotees will always feel some affection toward Santal 33, and to the scent memories that defined a specific time in their lives.
Once Le Labo became “the smell of cool,” countless dupes and similar smoky, musky, woody skin-scent profiles emerged, further cementing the relevancy of this scent profile. Maison Marie-Louis Balincourt No. 4, The Nue Co.’s Functional Fragrance (done by the same perfumer as Santal 33), Dossier’s Woody Sandalwood, and Quince’s Bois de Santal are all considered suitable dupes. Recently, Le Labo was spotted at Costco for a cool $99, where it appeals to a different kind of members-only crowd.
If Le Labo has come to be recognized as the smell of millennial heyday, we’re well on the way out. And if culture is largely defined by the current generation of young people, it looks like our attitudes toward personal scent are splintering into multiple directions — literally. Signature scents are losing ground to “scent wardrobes,” a different fragrance for every mood, place, or occasion. We contain multitudes, the thinking goes; so should our perfume collection.
The Le Labo archetype faded from specific person to abstract idea. But it still made us feel something. “The only time he ever cooked me breakfast, he made sous vide eggs and chicken and forced me to watch Porter Robinson’s Coachella set,” Asia recalled of her situationship. “What kind of person eats unseasoned chicken breast for breakfast?” Perhaps someone who also wears Thé Noir.
