Eucalyptus 20
Eau de Parfum, Le Labo (2025)

The Christmas break brought me a set of Le Labo 5ml samples, allowing for some interesting testing. Although overall a little underwhelming, E20 is certainly among the best of them. Too much eucalyptus is not a positive in personal scent as far as I am concerned. However, this is more of a bright incense, with a certain green-resinous note that speaks to the named component without emphasising it. There is that powdery-dusty but vibrant tone of a good incense, and a good fit among the parts. I'm not sure I'd be up for a full bottle, but for anyone who craves an incense with a bit of an edge and perhaps a more youthful theme, it would be well worth testing E20. Some solid composition, interesting things going on, nicely abstract - what more could you want?

Smells like dusty pine needles with incense, woods and earth. Its like a very close cousin to Vetiver 46, but more eastern and mysterious, more misty.

Recently got into the house of Le labo.
I have got a few samples of this one, and I like the woody dry incessyness of this.


Masculine


Overall 8.5- 10
Performance 7.9 - 10
Silage 7.4 - 10

First off, I feel the urge to warn you know that the words in this scent’s title that aren’t ‘Le’, ‘Labo’ or the number 20 is one of the words that I have trouble spelling. Anyway, Eucaluputs 20 smells great and also a bit redundant if you own any of these Comme des Garcons perfumes: Hinoki, Avignon, Black, maybe even a little bit of Kyoto. Euclptus opens with its titular note, except it’s more camphor than straight up eucalyptis, a bit wet and smoky and green, reminding me a little of the camphor in Feu Secret (Fzotic) or Bohea Boheme (Mona di Orio). I love this note because it always make me think of hiking through evergreen forests, fresh air, and far-off curlicues of delicious smoke, like when someone throws pine needles on a campfire.

Underneath this camphor or euycalptous, there is a fantastically dry, smoky frankincense lifted into the air by a shower of sparkly Coca Cola-ish aldehydes, which definitely gives off a very Avignon or Black (Comme des Garcons) vibe, to the point where they are eerily similar. About fifteen minutes later, I feel this accord tilting more definitively in the direction of Black than Avignon, as the bubbly soda pop aldehydes fade away and a sooty, smoky accord takes over, that nubbin of pine-like frankincense having burned all the way to ash in the censer.

For the rest of the ride, I am convinced that Le Labo Euocapliptus is a dry, smoky-hoary, whiskey-ish vetiver, with a scratchy wool sweater texture that is almost identical in structure and aroma to the wonderful Vetiver Insolent (Miller Harris), a perfume I wear an awful lot and with which I am therefore intimately familiar. It means that the slightly abrasive woody note (Iso E Super?) that bothers me in parts of Vetiver Insolent also bother me here, in the case of Eucapyptus 20.

But I have come to terms with its use in Vetiver Insolent, because I admit that its scratchy, cedar-adjacent obnoxiousness is essential to recreating the rather irritating ‘steel wool’ volatile esters that are naturally occurring in real cedarwood and vetiver distillates. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not really a deal-breaker for me in Eucalptus 20 either. That said, my need for this sort of sour-smoky-woody incense accord is more than adequately fulfilled elsewhere, so I am happy to sample this and move on.

My ideal environment would be a steam room, with occasional trips to a sauna, so when I heard that Le Labo was coming out with a eucalyptus fragrance, I was all ears. Sadly, I get very little of the wet steamy eucalyptus that I love, or the stately smell of eucalyptus in the wild, or even the smell of the florist shop which usually has a eucalyptus note. Instead, I get a burned-out cedar note reminiscent of an incense burner post use. I wish I got more eucalyptus, but that’s all she wrote, folks…. Just a ghost of cedar, a memory of labdanum, perhaps, but that is it.