Fragrance house

Clandestine

Clandestine Laboratories began in January 2010 as Mark Sage’s accidental obsession with fragrance. Sage, the brand’s founder-perfumer, taught himself the craft through raw fragrance materials and technical research, without a conventional background in fine fragrance. Originally intended to be anonymous, the brand later became publicly associated with Sage and developed a Brooklyn-based, outsider approach that challenges established perfumery conventions. Its work includes compositions such as Ashes, Film Noir, Silver, Belem, Novochoc, Master, and Certo. Orpheus, composed in 2013 and completed later, was a finalist for Basenotes’ 2022 artisanal fragrance of the year; a 2023 profile also highlighted Wendover and Sage’s deliberate use of smoky materials.