Le Labo Another 13

Le Labo was founded in New York in 2006 and built its reputation on a single retail idea: fragrances hand-blended fresh at the counter, decanted for you, and labelled with your name. The naming convention is equally deliberate, pairing a material with the number of ingredients in the formula, so Another 13 declares itself a thirteen-ingredient composition. The origin story is unusual even by Le Labo standards. The house states the scent was created in 2010 as an exclusive commissioned by AnOther Magazine, initiated by Sarah of the Paris concept store Colette in collaboration with the magazine's editor-in-chief Jefferson Hack; it only joined Le Labo's Classic Collection after Colette closed in December 2017. For seven years it was one of the hardest fragrances in the world to buy.

Le Labo describes it in blunt terms: ambroxyde, which it calls a synthetic animal musk, with jasmine and moss, and the phrase it uses is an addictive dirty potion. That is accurate. Ambroxide is the material most people know from Aventus and a hundred other modern bases, and here it is not a supporting player but the entire architecture, giving a dry, salty, oddly skin-like warmth that seems to radiate rather than sit. Around it, a soft fruit accord of pear and apple flickers at the opening, jasmine adds a thin bright edge, and mossy and musky materials thicken the middle into something faintly sweaty. Nathalie Lorson is commonly named as its author; Le Labo itself prints nothing on the label.

It is genuinely unisex and unusually good on other people, in the sense that it often smells better to those near you than to the wearer. A cold evening in the Drakensberg gives you the full effect; heat can push the animalic side further than some will want.

Two honest points. Ambroxide is a material many people go partially nose-blind to, so a proportion of wearers will swear it vanishes while everyone else in the room can still smell it. And projection is deceptive: expect eight hours or more of presence with very little apparent strength up close. It is expensive, minimalist and deliberately unfriendly to anyone wanting a conventional pretty perfume.