Reviews of Poivre 23 (2008)
by Le Labo

Le Labo Poivre 23

Le Labo has taken the step of making exclusive scents for the cities they open new outposts in. The Dallas, Aldehyde 44, and Paris, Vanille 44 are among my favorites from Le Labo so the difficulty of obtaining the scents can be annoying. That's beyond the ultra-expensive price tag once you get to the city in question. Late in 2008 Le Labo released three new city specific scents for LA, tokyo and London. Poivre 23 is the London exclusive to Liberty of London. Poivre 23 was composed by Nathalie Lorson who has made my two favorite scents from Lalique, Encre Noir and Perles de Lalique. A quirky aspect of the Le Labo scents is that while they are all named after a note they rarely display that note front and center. Poivre 23 breaks that rule right off the bat as the first note that hits my nose is dry pepper. We have a great spice store near our home and this is exactly the smell I get when I walk over to the pepper section. Thn from there an almost seamless transformation takes place as the pepper very casually mophs into a dry frankincense note. It is so hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Again this is the smell of the incense unburned ,dry and very light on the skin. Just when I think this is going to stay spicy, vanilla appears and softens the edges. The vanilla is also applied with a light hand so this never really becomes sweet just more creamy or rounded. The base continues with the light foot on the gas pedal as amber and patchouli finish this off with sandalwood playing around the edges in a peek-a-boo style. This is a scent full of powerful notes that in other perfumes and other hands would make for a scent that could knock one off one's feet. That Ms. Lorson has been able to combine these in such a subtle fashion it almost feels like the perfume version of souffle, rich and oh so light. I wish I could tell you to ignore this scent because of the pretentiousness behind it all but I just can't do that, I think it is one of Le Labo's best.

I recently smelled Le Labo's Poivre 23 at the Le Labo counter at Liberty's in London and was pretty disappointed. From all the reviews I'd read beforehand and given its apparent emphasis on pepper which is one of my favorite notes in perfumery, I was sure I would love it. And I didn't. Not even a little bit.

To me, Poivre 23 is chiefly a sweet ambery fragrance to which has been added a glug of vanilla, dollop of tobacco and a meager sprinkling of pepper. It smells like an inexpensive, cheap-ish cousin to Le Labo's Patchouli 24 (which I like but in very sparing amounts as further explained in that review) and shares a number of the same notes.

If you want a quality "rev up your engines" pepper fragrance that you will never smell on another person, I'd highly recommend Ormonde Jayne's Isfarkand. For a stylish, red cashmere turtleneck sort of pepper perfume, there is the endlessly exquisite L'Artisan Parfumeur's Poivre Piquant.

Here are Poivre 23's notes, courtesy of The Perfumed Court: pepper, cistus labdanum, incense, sandalwood, patchouli, vanilla, gaiac and styrax.