Le Labo

Le Labo was founded in New York in 2006 by Fabrice Penot and Eddie Roschi, two perfumers who wanted to create the fine fragrance brand organized around the artisanal perfume tradition rather than the mass-market luxury industry’s emphasis on celebrity endorsement and large advertising budgets. The founding principle, which holds that the fragrance should be blended to order in the store at the moment of purchase rather than manufactured in bulk and shipped from a warehouse, produces the Le Labo retail ritual: the customer selects the fragrance, the store blends it fresh from the concentrate and the alcohol, and the customer leaves with the fragrance that has been made specifically for them in the store.

The Santal 33, which is the Le Labo fragrance most widely recognized in the contemporary fragrance market, has been described as the fragrance that the decade of the 2010s smelled like. The sandalwood, cedarwood, cardamom, and the aldehydic note that the Santal 33 combines produce a fragrance that is simultaneously warm and cool, woody and slightly powdery, which has made it equally appropriate on men and women and across the formal and casual occasions of contemporary life.

The Georgetown M Street store at 3005 is at the western end of the M Street commercial corridor, in the section near the Georgetown University campus approach, where the fragrance boutique is the western anchor of the Georgetown luxury beauty and personal care retail cluster.

Hours run from 11am most days and noon on Sunday. The Le Labo Georgetown M Street store at 3005 provides the complete Le Labo experience: the fragrance sampling with the individual scent strips that allow the customer to evaluate each fragrance in sequence, the decision to select the fragrance that works with the specific customer’s skin chemistry after allowing each strip to dry and evolve, and the blending-to-order ritual in which the store staff combine the concentrate and the alcohol in the labeled bottle that exits the store bearing the customer’s name and the date of the purchase.

The city-exclusive fragrances that Le Labo produces for specific cities in the world, which include the Rose 31 for New York and the Tubereuse 40 for Los Angeles among the city exclusives, are available at each city’s Le Labo store for the resident and the visitor who wants the fragrance that belongs to a specific place. The Georgetown M Street store is open from 11am most days and noon on Sunday. The Le Labo Georgetown store at 3005 M Street NW also provides the monthly exclusive fragrance that the brand changes each month, making the Georgetown Le Labo the address for the collector of the Le Labo seasonal and limited releases that the brand produces through the year. The Georgetown Le Labo regular client who tracks the brand’s release calendar builds the fragrance collection with the specific limited editions that are only available at the individual stores during the month of the release. Hours run from 11am most days and noon on Sunday.