A Whiff Of Le Labo On Elizabeth Street

We were directed to Le Labo by someone who had heard of the independent perfumer who opened earlier this year. "You have to check this place out. It sounds totally pretentious," we were told. But one person's pretension is another's intrigue, and we like to approach a store with blank slate. We looked at the extensive website, and there were a lot of words written about smells including a manifesto, which is never a good sign. When you come right down to it, a fragrance either smells good or it doesn't. Still, we learned that founders Fabrice and Edouard were disillusioned with the commodification of fragrance, and wanted to return to a purer, more artistic expression of the fragrant arts. Find out if they succeeded in sparking their revolution after the jump.

The site also includes detailed descriptions and ingredient lists for their perfumes, an unusual choice as most perfumers prefer to keep their formulas secret, Le Labo, however, believes in the Creative Commons System, a new copyright concept that allows the sharing of information to advance their craft. That's a lot of concept for a bottle of perfume to carry.
We have always found the fragrance counter rather dizzying, so we were open to a new take on scent. For starters, Le Labo doesn't look like a perfumery, but more like a downtown bar with its industrial decor, but this merely reflects the shop's highly technical approach to scent, as well as a little hipster style. Perfumes bottled in chemist's flasks are categorized on tables as male, female or unisex replete with sprays and test strips for your perusal. A well-trained salesperson was there to carefully guide us through our exploration, making sure our olfactory senses weren't overwhelmed. We were surprised to find a rose scent categorized as men's, and yet it smelled not cloyingly sweet but remarkably masculine and still rosy which was enough to win us over. Anyone who can successfully pull off the unexpected and slightly transgressive gets our vote, and we don't even like that many fragrances.

Le Labo 233 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan