Third pick from my Maison Margiela discovery set. Luckily the weather was a bit cooler, so it felt like the perfect time to try it. The bottle says it’s meant to smell like woodfire and chestnut. The opening is the best of the 3 I’ve tried so far. Everything felt smoothly blended until the dry down. It has cloves, pink pepper, orange blossom, chestnut, guaiac wood, juniper, vanilla, Peru balsam and cashmeran. I could not pick out individual notes as much as I could feel the proportions shifting. The opening leaned lighter and more floral with sweet spices from clove and pepper. As it dried down, the spices softened and it became a sweet, smoky resin. I’m genuinely glad that a SWY-type scent finally lasts on my skin. If you didn’t know, SWY fragrances rarely last more than 2 hours on me, and that has been true for every fragrance from the line. This one, despite being an EDT, lasted longer on my skin than all the SWY fragrances I’ve tried combined. I expected to be disappointed with the performance, but this one really surprised me. It has been around 10 hours since application and it is still on my skin. Overall performance is roughly 10–12 hours, which is crazy for an EDT. Projection was solid at around 2-2.5 feet, becoming close to the skin after hour 5. By hour 9, it turns into a proper skin scent. By far my favourite from the set and easily one of the best winter fragrances I’ve tried. It is sweet, spicy, fuzzy, resinous, nutty and woody, all blended seamlessly. The vanilla is done beautifully and is incredibly addictive. It makes sense why I love it so much. This was created by Marie Salamagne, who was also behind YSL Muse, still my highest-rated fragrance. It feels like a full-circle moment because a Maison Margiela rep gave me a sample of Muse. I’m giving this a 9.4/10. I am nitpicking, but I still feel it is slightly overpriced and the profile lacks some complexity. That said, if I were to buy something from the house so far, it would be this. Also going forward should i post a picture of the samples i try or stick with google images?

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.