A Lab On Fire
Avant-garde niche perfumery by a Brazilian-born polyglot.
A Lab On Fire was founded in 2011 by Carlos Kusubayashi, a Brazilian born in São Paulo who was raised in Japan, trained in the craft of traditional joinery, and later moved to Paris and New York. That biography of cultural displacement and craft obsession is built into the brand's DNA: the fragrances behave as creative experiments rather than commercial propositions, with titles that carry the oblique wit of contemporary art — the house's best-known release bears the name What We Do in Paris Is Secret. Bottles are small and the aesthetic is deliberately minimal; prices in the eighty to one hundred and fifty dollar range for fifty-millilitre bottles make the line approachable relative to the broader niche market. Kusubayashi does not publicise a fixed roster of perfumer collaborators, preferring to let the compositions speak independently of named-nose marketing. The country listing as Belgium in some databases likely reflects an early European distribution or registration arrangement; the founder's primary bases have been Paris and the United States. A Lab On Fire remains a genuinely independent operation, resistant to easy categorisation and consistent in its preference for the unexpected over the merely beautiful.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
