Issue 10

Le Labo

In Conversation with Deborah Royer

Words SUBIN ANDERSON

In 2006, Le Labo opened its first lab at 233 Elizabeth Street in Nolita, New York. As the perfume house marks its 20th anniversary, the moment is reflected in “The Essence of Slow Perfumery,” a new book by Deborah Royer, Global Brand President and Creative Director, distilling two decades of thinking around scent, creation, and human connection. We speak with Royer about the intimacy of fragrance, the value of attentive making, and what lies ahead for Le Labo.

SUBIN ANDERSON In “The Essence of Slow Perfumery,” the idea of “essence” is approached as a philosophical practice as much as a material one. What did the process of writing the book reveal to you?

DEBORAH ROYER The process of writing “The Essence of Slow Perfumery” felt genuinely similar to the way I approach the creation of a new fragrance: beginning somewhere intuitive, then following that thread inward, stripping back whatever isn’t truly necessary until something honest surfaces. What I was distilling were convictions we’ve held for twenty years about slowness, patient attention, and the willingness to be shaped by the work itself.

Translating those from felt experience into language was revelatory in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Sitting with them on the page brought them out of abstraction and into the light. Ideas I had been moving through instinctually for years became clearer to me than they had ever been.

SA Much of that idea takes form in the labs at Le Labo. At a time when many things are designed to feel seamless or invisible, what does it mean to keep that moment of making “present?”

DR From the onset, Le Labo’s intention has been to return perfumery to its essential form, blending fragrances freshly by hand when requested. Keeping this process visible was never a strategic or marketing choice; it’s simply what Slow Perfumery is.

To witness the making, to be part of the creation, is to share an encounter that will never happen again in the same way. This is a fundamentally different experience from an object that simply arrives; it changes one’s relationship to it, and the label is the final gesture of that. A name, a date, a location… small markings that say: this happened, here, for you. In all of our labs, that practice is the same — a reinforcement of our values through the acknowledgement that every moment is unrepeatable.

SA What keeps your curiosity around scent? And personally, what particular scent or notes have you been enjoying lately, as the weather begins to warm?

DR Scent continues to surprise me because it refuses to be fixed. You can work with the same material for decades and encounter it in new ways because you are different, the light is different, and the conditions are different. A single ingredient can reveal an entirely different dimension of itself depending on what surrounds it.
It reminds me of how a painter may work with color, or how a musician finds something new when familiar notes meet a new harmony. Those paradoxical qualities of creation are endlessly instructive to me: how something so deeply known can remain insistent on the moment you’re actually in.

And as the weather begins to warm, I typically gravitate toward scents that feel bright, luminous, and emergent with potential, like BIGARADE 18 (bitter orange) and FLEUR D’ORANGER 27.

At the same time, my deepest attention is almost always with whatever composition I’m currently in the middle of. The creations in progress occupy a kind of secret world for me and are where my curiosity is fully at work, which makes them endlessly compelling.

SA The brand now exists in many cities around the world, and each store carries a recognizable way of working.

DR We’ve always thought of our labs as thresholds, spaces where stepping inside changes your sense of presence. The outside noise softens, time slows, and you’re free to move at your own pace, letting the senses lead.
The textures and details inside each lab are intentional. While every location is different, we seek out spaces that have lived lives before us and work to preserve the history in each. We are drawn to materials that carry evidence of hands: worn surfaces, irregular forms, objects that hold the mark of their origins. These choices reflect our belief that evidence of humanity, time, and care adds to an object’s significance rather than being flaws to correct. It reflects the Japanese wabi-sabi mindset that has always guided us, which finds beauty in what is allowed to remain unfinished and “imperfect.”
At the center of each lab sits the counter and scale, alongside the tools — beakers, pipettes, and implements for measuring and blending fragrances. The architecture of every lab is organized in service of our craft and the act of making.

SA And over time, what have you noticed about how fragrance is found in people’s lives, and the community Le Labo grows around it?

DR What I observe, across place and context, is how fragrance always speaks first to someone’s inner world. People are drawn to a scent for reasons they can’t always explain. As a medium, it bypasses rational deliberation and arrives somewhere more instinctual, connecting with memories, dreams, and hidden parts of our consciousness. The conversations that open up around these encounters are something we witness every day in our labs, and remind us how transformative scent can be when we allow ourselves to receive it. Fragrance becomes woven into daily life, whether as a morning ritual before leaving the house or a moment to recenter in the middle of the day. There’s a private continuity in that repetition, a way of remaining present to oneself. And because scent speaks so directly to the interior, the fragrance someone is drawn to at one moment in life often says something quite different from what moves them years later.
My own relationship to scent follows that same current. Different fragrances speak to me in different seasons, hours, or moods. Staying attentive to that, rather than choosing by habit, is what keeps the practice alive for me.

The community that has grown around Le Labo over 20 years feels held together by a similar intuition: individuals who have found, through fragrance, a different relationship to attention and to themselves. A shared recognition that slowness is worth choosing, that the senses speak their own language, that some experiences are worth making space for. It’s something we never set out to design. It arrived on its own terms and continues to be one of our greatest teachers.

SA As Le Labo marks its 20th anniversary, how do you imagine its founding sensibility evolving in the next chapter of the brand?

DR After two decades, the entirety of our founding manifesto remains true: the conviction that beauty is worth slowing down for. That honesty in what we make and how we make it is non-negotiable. That unengineered, genuine human connection is both the means and the end.

These are values we have always held, and that have only grown sharper and more necessary with time. “The Essence of Slow Perfumery” is both a distillation of what we’ve learned and an orientation toward what comes next. Wabi-sabi teaches us that incompleteness is not a failure of form but our greatest guide, and that a practice alive to its own unfinishedness is the only kind worth having.

From here, our next chapter is about deepening. The most “alive” possibility to me is always staying willing to be shaped by what the work itself asks for – how to expand without diluting, how to let new places and people reveal new dimensions without losing what makes our craft specific. How to be more fully what we have always been, even as the world accelerates in the opposite direction. And how always remain open to what this work is still becoming, trusting that what is still forming will reveal itself in its own time.