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.

Once a collection reaches a certain point, let’s say over 100 bottles, when the time comes that a bottle gets polished off it’s very much a satisfying sensation and almost a celebratory event,lol 😂. Two excellent frags that have served me well these last couple years, and money well spent. Enjoy the evening frag fam.