In a lot of cases per­fumes are auto­mat­i­cally con­nected to mass pro­duced scents in glossy bot­tles pro­duced by high fash­ion brands and endorsed by big name celebri­ties. These prod­ucts are mar­keted as unique and out­stand­ing to every sin­gle one of the bunch of mil­lions of buy­ers who fall into the cheap decep­tion with­out fur­ther knowl­edge or care.

Le Labo founders & logo

On the totally oppo­site side of this tra­di­tional way of think­ing of we have a dynamic brand swim­ming against the cur­rent in the waters of the per­fumes. Le Labo are two guys, Edouard and Fab­rice, artists slash sci­en­tists of the per­fume busi­ness, mak­ing fra­grances by hand out of the finest ingre­di­ents with years of care­ful exper­i­ment­ing turned into expertise.

In 2006 Le Labo started up their first per­fumery lab in New York. Today there’s labs also in Lon­don, Los Ange­les and Tokyo. In the labs you can buy fra­grances for­mu­lated by hand, have a made-to-order fra­grance cre­ated just for you or open up your senses and learn some basics of per­fumery by freely mix­ing together dif­fer­ent per­fume oils and alco­hol. Occa­sion­ally there’s work­shops and sam­pling pro­grams to encour­age peo­ple to dis­cover their own thing. And if you’re really up for it, you can also buy a so called “Olfac­tionary set” which enables its pur­chaser to engage in the art of per­fume mak­ing at home with essen­tial tools and a palette of 40 fun­da­men­tal nat­ural essences used in perfumery.

Le Labo’s co-Founder Edouard Roschi was kind enough to tell us a lit­tle more about Le Labo’s busi­ness and perfumes.

Mash­mar­ket: How did you, two guys, end up mak­ing per­fumes in the first place? Not exactly the most obvi­ous choice, or is it?

Edouard Roschi: We worked for big com­pa­nies like Fir­menich and Sym­rise, devel­op­ing per­fumes for oth­ers and then met while work­ing at L’Oreal.  So we were pay­ing our cor­po­rate dues and learn­ing what to do and not do until we decided that that was enough and that it was time to leave that nest and fly into bluer skies. Actu­ally this doesn’t answer your ques­tion.  I stud­ied chem­istry and a friend of mine told me that with a chem­istry degree I could do things per­fumery so I gave it a shot and took it from there.

MM: How’s your nor­mal day at the lab?

ER: It can be excit­ing or very bor­ing.  If it’s too bor­ing I go and play ten­nis, ride my bike or shoot pic­tures.  If it’s excit­ing I am check­ing out new store loca­tions, devel­op­ing scents, prod­ucts, talk­ing and meet­ing peo­ple we work with or want to work with, train­ing our staff, get­ting some fund­ing, or trav­el­ling for spe­cial events or per­fume launches…  As you can see it’s all mixed up.  The good thing is that meet­ings are short, deci­sions are quick and there is no politics.

Lab counter

MM: Can you describe (shortly) the actual process of for­mu­lat­ing a new/custom fragrance?

ER: We don’t do cus­tom.  We develop a col­lec­tion of scents in part­ner­ship with big per­fumers and then we sell them to our clients in our stores at the order, mean­ing we build the actual prod­uct in front of the client.  Clients don’t know how to mix per­fumes and what they want and don’t speak that lan­guage.  We impose on them what we believe are amaz­ing scents.

MM: Do you need some spe­cial skills/knowledge to be able to make fra­grances “by hand”? Does it come close to alchemy?

ER: Mix­ing fra­grances is train­ing sim­i­lar to lab tech­ni­cian train­ing.  Any­one can do as long as you are tidy, like details etc.    But you are told what to mix. Devel­op­ing scents on the other hand, the actual for­mula,  takes years of train­ing.  5 or 6 until you can actu­ally make a per­fume and per­haps 10 to become a rec­og­nized perfumer.

MM: What are the worst smells you can think of and why?

ER: Prob­a­bly the smell of crap for obvi­ous reasons.

MM: Any­thing else you’d like to share with us?

ER: Thank you for giv­ing us this oppor­tu­nity and for con­tact­ing us.

Make sure to visit Le Labo’s web­site for every­thing you ever wanted to know about fra­grances and stink bombs!

www.lelabofragrances.com

Le Labo products

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