Eau du LABO

If perfume, or anything called perfume, is true to its etymology, then it should be smoky like incense in the high church–dense and magical, as though in the time it takes for the sillage to waft past us, radical transformations might take place. Perfume in that sense, we would expect to find at Versailles three centuries ago in the grande age of tightly-curled wigs when high heels and tights were popular among men, not, for example, in the AmericanProtestantClean Bushian White House. The kind of perfume I’m talking about, real perfume, should be thick and amber-colored and come in crystal bottles with gilded tops, and the shop should be stacked to the ceilings and the armchairs should be low and the tinkle of an old bell should alert the perfumer, who is also the clerk, of the ladies and gentlemen who have just come in to poke their powdered noses into the vials of rose and lavender and musk… right?

Luckily, this is a new age, and just because we have dropped the heavy aesthetic of real perfume doesn’t mean that we have to trim down the big smell. And although Le LABO is not shrouded in mystery by curtains and smoke, their line of perfumes is nothing short of the real thing. On Elizabeth street you will find the SoHo shop: hygienic, with its white tile and bare wood floorboards and stainless steel counters. The employees here wear lab coats, not monacles, and the packaging is simple–brown cardstock with black stamps; the clear bottles with (your name!) on the label look like curealls from the apothecary. The 10, excuse me 11, Le LABO perfumes are displayed on five open tables with pre-sprayed scent strips: 3 for women, 3 for men, 3 unisex, 1 for babies, and one exclusively New York. The natural essences come from Grasse, and the numbers in each name represent the number of ingredients the formula has.

But even though I have read many good things about the Le LABO line of fragrances, I admit I was wary. It looked too clean. The mystic in me distrusted such transparency, and I half expected to find a bunch of scent-sketches trying to sell themselves as something more. I mean, isn’t it the inexplicable that we find most interesting? –That lends perfume its true seductive powers? Le LABO certainly doesn’t think so. In fact, for a notable fee, they will provide perfume enthusiasts with the OLFACTIONARY, a kind of beginners dictionary of smells with 40 vials of important natural essences, so that we can all begin to develop our olfactory palettes and liberate ourselves from the “herd of consumers manipulated by the latest in advertising, fashion trends and gadgetry…” The passionate founders of Le LABO know perfume in the Biblical sense–intimately, by love–and they want the people who wear their perfumes to appreciate them in the same way. Paramount, however, are the perfumes themselves, which are certainly respectable. All of them have a rather strange edge in the top notes and warm up as they dry. I particularly liked Neroli 36, Fleur d’Oranger 27 and Rose 31 (with lots of wood); In the end I tried Iris 39 on skin and loved the results as the earthier moss and wood notes came through in drydown. Although the first two of those were labeled unisex, and the Rose is supposed to be for men, those distinctions seem to me to be for marketing purposes; all the fragrances could work for both men and women.

At the end of the day, the Le LABO lineup is still not as dirty as I like, but worth checking out (as their press attests) on a rainy day in SoHo, or anytime via interweb.