What We Do Is Secret / A Lab on Fire
What We Do Is Secret / A Lab on Fire
92 votes
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Black sage and chamomile slam forward with botanical intensity, backed by an almost tea-like astringency that catches you slightly off-guard. Sweetgrass offers a gentle counterpoint, herbaceous and faintly sweet, whilst the composition immediately establishes itself as something deliberately unconventional rather than traditionally pretty.
Cannabis and hay materialise alongside rosebud and jonquil, introducing a peppery, slightly green sensuality that transforms the initial herbal character into something more complex and layered. The fragrance becomes less about botanical clarity and more about textural contrast—dusty florals meeting peppery green elements, creating a composition with genuine personality rather than mere prettiness.
Cedar and vetiver take command, grounding everything into soil and musk, leaving behind a quietly earthy, almost mineral quality that suggests damp earth and weathered wood. The longevity here is admittedly modest, fading to a whisper rather than a statement, but what remains is austere and oddly contemplative—a fragrance that refuses to shout.
California Snow arrives as a deliberate contradiction—a fragrance that insists you can capture the mineral clarity of alpine air whilst remaining rooted in California's sun-baked earth. Mackenzie Reilly has constructed something genuinely peculiar here: a floral composition that feels almost herbal to the point of medicinal, yet never clinical.
The opening establishes black sage and chamomile as primary architects, immediately evoking dried botanicals rather than fresh florals. There's a tea-like quality that runs throughout—not bergamot-driven citrus, but genuine steeped herbs, herbaceous and slightly bitter. Sweetgrass adds an unexpected sweetness, though it reads more like hay-scented nostalgia than confection. This is where the fragrance's contradictions begin: it smells simultaneously like a high-altitude meadow and a California garden in late summer, as though someone's attempting to reconcile two opposing geographies.
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3.6/5 (135)