The Story
Why it exists.
Antoine Lie is known for olfactory signatures that refuse to behave, so when Laboratorio Olfattivo wanted to inaugurate their new collaboration with him, they gave him one instruction: surprise us. The brief was simple and the creative freedom was total. Lie had been circling the smell of underground spaces for years, the particular atmosphere of places built for music that exists outside the mainstream, venues where sound becomes architecture and anonymity becomes freedom. Underground Vibes is the translation of that world into liquid form. Not a recreation of a place, but an evocation of what those spaces feel like at 3 AM, when the room has become its own organism.
If this were a song
Community picks
Dead Flowers
The Stooges
The Beginning
Antoine Lie is known for olfactory signatures that refuse to behave, so when Laboratorio Olfattivo wanted to inaugurate their new collaboration with him, they gave him one instruction: surprise us. The brief was simple and the creative freedom was total. Lie had been circling the smell of underground spaces for years, the particular atmosphere of places built for music that exists outside the mainstream, venues where sound becomes architecture and anonymity becomes freedom. Underground Vibes is the translation of that world into liquid form. Not a recreation of a place, but an evocation of what those spaces feel like at 3 AM, when the room has become its own organism.
The material palette reads like a manifesto against safety. Hemp opens alongside whisky CO2, unusual adjacencies that shouldn't work but do, anchored by juniper berry's clean bite cutting through the herbal edge. The heart is where most fragrances get polite: not this one. Fuel and cement are industrial signifiers, yes, but they're also textures, the weight of air in a packed room, the residue of bodies and sound. Cypriol adds a leathery, tar-like depth that few Western noses recognize by name, and immortelle brings its characteristic hay-and-honey sweetness to prevent total desolation. The result is a heart that smells like memory and sweat and possibility.
The Evolution
The opening lands all at once, cannabis and whisky CO2 arriving together, with juniper berry lifting the whole thing slightly upward. It's green without being fresh, boozy without being sweet. The fuel note arrives within minutes, but here it's not aggressive; it's atmospheric, like walking past a generator that powers the sound system across the warehouse. Thirty minutes in, the cement materializes, dry, mineral, almost dusty. The cannabis hasn't disappeared; it's deepened, woven underneath everything like a bassline that you feel more than hear. The drydown is where patience rewards. Indonesian patchouli and Vietnamese oud arrive slowly, replacing the initial intensity with something earthier and more intimate. Six to eight hours later, on skin, the sandalwood and orris root linger as a warm, slightly powdery whisper, the echo of a night that ended hours ago.
Cultural Impact
Underground Vibes enters a perfume landscape saturated with safe, agreeable florals and woods. Its unapologetic use of fuel and cement echoes the post-industrial aesthetic that has influenced fashion, music, and visual art since the early 2000s. The fragrance aligns with a growing cultural shift toward authenticity over polish, where consumers seek scents that tell stories rather than blend in. Laboratorio Olfattivo's Extreme Collection, of which this is a flagship, signals a willingness to challenge commercial perfume conventions. The cannabis and whisky pairing taps into craft cocktail culture's influence on fragrance, where bartenders and perfumers share techniques and vocabularies.
The House
Italy · Est. 2009
Laboratorio Olfattivo is an independent Italian niche house founded in Rome in 2009 by creative director Roberto Drago and business partner Daniela Caon. The house operates as a creative platform, collaborating with perfume craftsmen who work autonomously under the Laboratorio Olfattivo name rather than operating through an in-house perfumer. Each fragrance exists as its own standalone work, not part of a numbered collection. The house is recognizable by a characteristic dark amber, vetiver, and resin signature anchored by a consistent base structure across releases. Arancia Rossa stands out as a vivid, saturated blood-orange perfume built over that warm amber-vetiver foundation. The catalog spans orientals with deep burnished woods and resins alongside brighter citrus compositions. The output is deliberately unhurried, with one to three new fragrances arriving most years, and the two founders remain the sole creative force behind the label. Roberto's family background runs through the Italian perfume trade, reportedly through his father Luigi Drago's work running a perfume distribution house. By contrast, Laboratorio Olfattivo itself has never sought outside investment, remaining entirely founder-owned and operated. The self-funded structure means完全没有外部资金压力,创意方向不受投资者期望驱动。This shape shifting has translated into a genuine point of view that longtime followers recognize in the catalog. The founding story holds particular interest within the niche fragrance community because the label avoids the conventional channels of beauty entrepreneurism. There is no private label background, no pivot from cosmetics, and no celebrity angle. Instead, a distribution professional and a marketing executive with a shared passion built something from scratch in Rome and held to it for over a decade. The name Laboratorio Olfattivo translates roughly to olfactory laboratory. It signals that the house is understood as a working studio for assembling aromatic materials rather than a heritage brand performing its own mythology. The founder-driven ethos has also meant that the house has remained genuinely small in team size, operating with a long-term perspective rather than chasing market relevance. Every creative decision filters through the two founders, contributing to a catalog that feels internally motivated rather than assembled by committee.
If this were a song
Community picks
This fragrance sounds like the moment before the bass drops, anticipatory, charged, slightly dangerous. Dark, reverberant, with texture that suggests concrete and smoke rather than polish. The kind of track that fills a room without asking. If Underground Vibes were a song, it would be the one playing when you first walk in and everything else fades slightly.
Dead Flowers
The Stooges






















