Le Labo incense sticks have arrived, and they carry the same scent-as-statement logic that has made the brand’s fragrances a kind of ambient shorthand for certain neighbourhoods, restaurants and living rooms across the past decade. The new line, which debuted earlier this month, comprises three sticks drawn from some of the brand’s best-known fragrances: Santal 26, Ambroxyde 17 and Encens 9. At $48 each, they come packaged in the brand’s signature test-tube bottles and were made, according to Le Labo, in collaboration with a twelfth-generation, family-owned workshop in Kyoto using traditional Japanese techniques.
The format itself is telling. Le Labo’s first Santal release was not a perfume at all but a candle and room spray: Santal 26. The brand has always understood that what your home smells like is a form of expression just as deliberate as anything hanging on the wall. Incense is the logical next move.
What Le Labo Incense Sticks Actually Smell Like
Having spent time recently around incense in and near Kyoto, the physical similarity is immediately clear. These are thin, short and delicate sticks, closer to the refined end of Japanese incense tradition than to the resin-heavy, dipped copal sticks you might pick up at a farmers’ market. Typical Japanese incense leans subtle and woody. The Le Labo version does not always follow that path.
The Ambroxyde 17 sticks tested here are built around a synthetic molecule that evokes ambergris, a rare substance historically derived from sperm whales and once prized in perfumery for its fixative properties. The result is a scent that manages to feel both vaguely nostalgic and thoroughly modern. It is not shy. Burn one on a workday afternoon and a ribbon of smoke will cross the room and make itself known before you have time to register it consciously. Light one on the coffee table on a slow Sunday and do not be surprised when someone nearby asks, mid-sentence, what that smell is.
These are not ambient products. They do not slip into the background the way a reed diffuser might. They open proceedings. They set a tone. The comparison to a lo-fi playlist is not unfair: Ambroxyde 17 is not that. It is closer to the first bars of something that demands you put your phone down.
Kōdō and the Case for Paying Attention
The brand draws on the Japanese practice of Kōdō, the art of appreciating incense, as the conceptual frame for the range. In that tradition, incense is not background noise but an invitation to stop, focus and let the senses lead. That idea holds up in practice. There is something in the particular duration and delicacy of a short incense stick, burning down to nothing in a matter of minutes, that creates a useful boundary around a moment. It is long enough to shift your mood but short enough that it does not outstay its welcome.
For those familiar with Le Labo’s scent numbering, Encens 9 is likely to be the most restrained of the three, its name alone pointing toward something more meditative. Ambroxyde 17, a close cousin of the cult favourite Another 13, is the showiest. Santal 26 sits in the middle, carrying the warm, creamy cedar signature that has defined so many corners of so many cities over the past decade.
Le Labo was founded in 2006, and from the outset its approach has treated fragrance as cultural context as much as product. The incense line extends that thinking into the domestic space: not just what you wear, but what your home announces when someone walks through the door. At $48 a tube, these are a considered buy rather than an impulse one. But for anyone who has already handed over that much for the brand’s candles, the step across to Le Labo‘s incense sticks will feel like a short one.
