Continuing my Maison Margiela discovery set. Still going in order, so the next one was Lazy Sunday Morning. I thought it would be funny to try this on a Sunday, but I didn’t want to ruin the order, so here we are. The opening is yet again very nice. Clean aldehydes, green and floral lily-of-the-valley, and sweet pear. In a few minutes you get the trio of florals: rose, iris, and orange blossom. Rose is the dominant one. The base is just musk and ambrette for me; I don’t get the patchouli. It’s a high-quality floral fabric softener on a clean, fresh-out-of-laundry linen sheet. Definitely not how my lazy Sunday afternoon smells 😂 but would I want it to smell like this? Heck yeah. Just when I thought I found my next purchase, the performance shut me up. It performs like an EDC with about 30 mins of projection and roughly 3-4 hrs of total lifespan. My skin is optimal today and, despite that, the performance sucked. I reapplied after a few hrs thinking I went nose blind, but nope. I’m noticing a pattern with MM and their fragrance performance. I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt purely because this is a 2 1/2-year-old discovery set. If I don’t get good performance on any of them, I’ll be retesting with a new discovery set. I’ve not yet smelled something clean floral like this. Closest was Byredo Blanche. It’s so comforting and fuzzy. If I could wear something at home, it would be this DNA but with better performance. Assuming it’s a faulty sample, I’d give it an 8/10. I have nothing to complain about the profile; all my complaints are about the performance. There’s bad and then there’s unacceptable. Again, it could be that the samples expired or were stored incorrectly. Have you tried anything similar? Let me know.

Clandestine Laboratories is one of those indie fragrance houses that feels different from the normal niche crowd. This is not a brand trying to smell like everything else at Neiman Marcus or copy the same blue, amber, vanilla, oud trends everybody else is chasing. The house has more of an underground, artistic, almost secret-lab feel to it. The perfumer behind the house is Mark Sage, and what makes the brand interesting is that the scents feel personal, experimental, but still wearable. A lot of indie brands can get weird just for the sake of being weird, but Clandestine seems to take unusual ideas and actually turn them into fragrances you can wear. Fragrantica describes Mark Sage as having a chemistry background and being more of an outsider to the perfume world, which honestly makes sense when you smell the style — it does not feel like committee-made perfumery. To me, this house is for people who are tired of safe niche. If you want clean designer mass appeal, this may not be the first house I would point you to. But if you like fragrances with character, texture, evolution, and a little darkness or oddness underneath, this is a house worth sampling. They seem to do a lot of fragrances that have contrast: fresh but dirty, bright but shadowy, woody but airy, sweet but strange. That is what makes them stand out. Overall house style: indie, artistic, textured, unusual, wearable but is not basic best for: fragrance collectors, niche lovers, people who want something different.Not for: people who only like easy compliment-getter designer scents. Pool Boy / The Boy Review Pool Boy, now listed by the brand as The Boy, is probably the scent that got a lot of people talking about Clandestine Laboratories. The brand describes it as a spring-summer fragrance that works great in hot weather, with lemon iced tea, guava, passion fruit, hyssop, lavender, iris, rose, cedar, tobacco, vetiver, tree-moss, and animalic musk. this is not just a basic poolside freshie. It opens fruity, juicy, and tropical with that guava and passion fruit feel, but it does not stay like a simple sweet summer scent. There is a tea-like freshness in it, almost like a lemon iced tea vibe, but underneath that it has herbal, woody, mossy, and musky parts that make it more interesting.

I've been coming to the realization lately that I really enjoy fragrances with a prominent fig notes. I have a handful, but I'd like to try some more and I'd love to hear your suggestions. I currently own.. Fig ecstasy and fig me up by Mancera Liam by Lattafa Light blue Capri in love by D&G And a sample of Parisian Musc by Matiere Premiere which is next on my list once I find a steal or tester. Anything else you gents think I should get my nose on?