The Story
Why it exists.
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.
