#sotd... Aquatica by Rayhaan... This opens with a blast of Lime. Very good projection for about 1.5 hours. As it starts to settle down, the coconut makes its way forward to take over from there. To my nose, those are the two main characters in this fragrance... I did pickup on some sweetness and very little bit of a musky scent. I got between 6 to 7 hours before it dropped into of musky scent to finish it off.

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.

Pronounced "See-ah-j", is the French/technical term for the trail created by a scent when it is worn on the skin. It comes from the French for "wake" and can best be described as how a fragrance diffuses "in a person's wake," or behind the wearer as they move. A fragrance need not be a heavy one to have a large sillage. Sillage is not the same as projection (how a fragrance is perceived by others around the wearer). Instead, it is enhanced by motion and ambient temperature as well as the inherent qualities of the skin (as well as, to refer to my last post, if it contains Davana flower, or other similar "chameleon" ingredients). It (the skin chemistry) becomes a substrate to the scent. For the aforementioned "ambient temperature", this is why some scents, such as the Rayhaan Lion eau de parfum I previously posted, would be considered "too intense" for summer/hot weather. Whereas, the Armani Stronger With You line, for example, is better in cold weather; claimed by many to have a sillage over a kilometer. The video attached to this features a perfume student rating different men's colognes, and also mentions "sillage", among other terms. Also, her reaction to Armani SWYA from 4:58 to 5:30 is priceless ;-)