Le Labo
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The first fifteen minutes deliver a sharp, almost aqueous freshness—green and subtly fruity without being sweet, like biting into an unripe pear beside a vase of white flowers that's been sitting in the same water for three days. The citruses and apple register as texture rather than flavour, creating a clean brightness that immediately begins to fuse with the ambroxan's saline warmth.
As the fragrance settles into its stride, the amyl salicylate emerges with its characteristic hedione-adjacent jasmine radiance, laced with the soft, cottony embrace of ambrette seed. The moss adds a touch of grey-green earthiness, but everything remains remarkably sheer and close to the skin, pulsing with that peculiar warmth that makes you wonder if you're smelling the perfume or the person wearing it.
What remains is pure molecular comfort: woody-musky abstraction that clings to fabric and hair with gentle persistence. The cetalox and ISO E Super create an almost narcotic woodiness, simultaneously familiar and unplaceable, while the musk complex continues its quiet oscillation between clean and carnal, never quite resolving into either.
Another 13 is the olfactive equivalent of skin on skin—intimate, ambiguous, and utterly magnetic. Nathalie Lorson has orchestrated a masterclass in molecular minimalism here, building a fragrance that hovers in that liminal space between natural and synthetic, clean and animalic. The opening whisper of pear and apple feels almost subliminal, just enough fruit to soften the angular edges of what's essentially a study in contemporary musks. At its core, this is ambroxan, ambrette, and amyl salicylate engaged in a ménage à trois, the salty-sweet jasmine derivative colliding with lactonic musk in a way that smells simultaneously like fresh laundry, unwashed hair, and expensive hotel sheets. The ISO E Super and Cetalox create that famous halo effect—fuzzy, enveloping, maddeningly difficult to pin down. There's a mineral quality that reads as cold metal or rainwater on pavement, undercut by the faint animalic warmth of helvetolide that suggests body heat without ever becoming sweaty. This isn't a fragrance that announces itself; it infiltrates. It's for those who've grown tired of perfume that performs, who want something that feels worn-in rather than worn. You'll find it on creative directors in Shoreditch, art collectors in Marylebone, anyone who treats scent as an extension of their skin rather than an accessory. It's terribly cool without trying, which is precisely the point.
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3.8/5 (27.2k)