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.

Baní from Day Three Fragrances is one of the better tropical fruit fragrances out there because it does not smell like cheap fruit punch or a sticky mango body spray. This is more of a realistic green mango, mango leaf, papaya, creamy coconut, sugarcane, and soft floral musk type of scent. The official note breakdown lists mango pulp, mango leaves, papaya, jasmine, magnolia, creamy coconut, green sugarcane, and sandalwood. Baní smells like walking through a tropical market or island town where ripe mangoes, green mango leaves, sugarcane, and coconut are all in the air. The mango is the star, but it is not overly syrupy. It has that greener, fresher, more natural mango feel instead of that super sweet candy mango smell. The opening is bright, juicy, and tropical. You get the mango right away, but there is also a green leafy side that keeps it from being too sweet. The papaya adds more tropical fruit body, and then the coconut starts coming in, but it is not a heavy sunscreen coconut. It is smoother, creamier, and more natural. As it dries down, the florals give it a cleaner, softer feel. The jasmine and magnolia are there, but they do not turn it into a feminine white floral bomb. They just polish the fragrance and give it more class. Then the sugarcane and sandalwood come in and make it slightly sweet, warm, and smooth. To me, this is a grown tropical scent. It is fun and sunny, but it still feels niche. It is not trying to be a designer blue fragrance, and it is not trying to be another basic coconut beach scent. It has personality. Baní smells like:green mango, tropical fruit, creamy coconut, sugarcane, soft florals, and warm skin. Performance:Longevity: 6–8 hoursProjection: moderate, about 2–3 feet early onSillage: noticeable but not loudDry down: soft tropical musk, sugarcane, coconut, and sandalwood Best occasions:Pool day, brunch, vacation, casual summer wear, warm evenings, beach-type settings, or anytime you want a tropical scent that still smells niche and grown.

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.