Thoughts? https://youtu.be/Y6qXlMKQ-7Y?si=3kyHVl4Sy2a-7IeH

Yesterday I was traveling with my family and we ended up at a pretty large mall. There was a fragrance store there and I went in to see what they had. Mostly designer but they did have a few niche that I wasn’t very familiar with. They actually had givenchey gentlemen original which I had been looking for. The guy told me he didn’t have a sample of it and I was fine with that. Then I saw that the bottom of the wrapper was carefully opened and you can tell it had been like that for a while. I said this has been opened already. Looks like it’s already been tested. I looked at a few other boxes and they were also opened. I watched him very carefully open the fragrance so I could sample it and then reseal it like it was brand new. Ps gentlemen original is not something that I like at all. I’m so glad I didn’t blind buy that one.

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.