Beauty’s best innovations don’t always chase the next big thing. This issue celebrates enduring icons, thoughtful craftsmanship, and modern classics – from a fragrance created for a queen nearly five centuries ago to design-forward home scents, rose-powered skincare, and even a dog shampoo worthy of your vanity.
As Le Labo marks its 20th anniversary, the perfume house continues its unhurried expansion, with hand-blended scents that prioritize the here and now.
When Le Labo founders Fabrice Penot and Eddie Roschi set out to create a fragrance line in 2006, they knew the playbook: optimization, effi ciency, a montage of conveyor belts, and rapid- fire launches. After all, they had met at a European beauty conglomerate, where the gloss of fashion houses was bottled up for global reach. But Le Labo was an entirely different proposition. They set up shop on a then-sleepy street in Nolita, offering a suite of 10 perfumes that would be hand-blended to order. It was an homage to an old-world apothecary: potions designed to stir a sensory connection to the scent as well as to the person making it. The quaint operation didn’t stay small for long. A Tokyo flagship opened the following year, inspiring the fi rst City Exclusive fragrance, the musky Gaiac 10, in a bid to revive the idea of site-specifi c novelties. By 2011, Le Labo released what would become the era’s olfactive backdrop, translating the scent of its original candle into the wearable, inescapable Santal 33.
Two decades in, Le Labo’s approach to what the brand calls “slow perfumery” stands out as industry counterprogramming, something that’s even more notable following its acquisition by Estée Lauder in 2014. The numbers have changed – 22 core fragrances, 140 standalone stores – but much remains exactly the same: the humanistic experience, the utilitarian packaging, the emphasis on quiet discovery in lieu of celebrity campaigns.
“It’s diffi cult for any brand to scale without losing the sense of who you are,” says Deborah Royer, the soft-spoken Frenchwoman who joined Le Labo in 2015 and now serves as its global brand president and creative director. She has just ordered soba tea in her Brooklyn neighborhood – walking distance from the company’s offi ce in Williamsburg – and the careful countertop preparation mirrors her interests in natural materials and intentionality. Royer, who grew up on her family’s farm outside Reims, 80 miles northeast of Paris, is often on the road, visiting producers (of bergamot in Italy, sandalwood in Australia) and also scouting new properties. The Kyoto Machiya, which Le Labo opened in 2024, is emblematic of her vision: a former sake brewery restored with the help of local artisans, where the recently launched incense wafts through the tatami rooms.
“I have always been drawn to environments that offer a pause within daily life,” says Royer. This fall’s new City Exclusive (Le Labo’s nineteenth to date) – called Shiu 25, after a type of camphor tree known as Ho wood – evokes the stillness of a Beijing courtyard. Inside, she says, “you can sense the palpable accumulation of time.” The same can be said for Royer’s new book, The Essence of Slow Perfumery, a roving survey with farmer portraits, ruminative texts, and even Proust questionnaires featuring a mix of creative collaborators. Its publication is synced with the 20th anniversary, but Royer initially began it as a way to process the brand’s trajectory and imagine its next arc. “I make a million decisions a day, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just following a path that was too comfortable,” she says. Leaving room for the unknown is an idea that Royer sees as intrinsic to the brand. This quality of spaciousness sets Le Labo apart, as seen in its Japanese-inspired interiors and in the desire to let the fragrances speak for themselves. A line from poet Mary Oliver, which Royer quotes in the book, gets to the heart of it: “Maybe just looking and listening is the real work; maybe the world, without us, is the real poem.”
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 7 – HERITAGE, LEGACY, FUTURE – out September 18! Order your copy here.
Photography courtesy of Le Labo
Instagram: @lelabofragrances
