NSFRTÅ Parfum

A name cut into the abbey stones, its meaning long gone.

The townspeople said it in whispers. Nosferatu, with most of the vowels gone, carved into the jagged stones of the abandoned abbey. Its meaning was lost to time and heavy with dread anyway. On moonless nights travellers reported hollow footsteps and a low guttural hum coming up out of the crypt, a place where danger and temptation intertwine. Only the desperate and the foolish went in, after riches said to be buried somewhere in the shadowed halls, and none of them came out.

Smoked birch and black pepper arrive first, absinthe running bitter and green behind them. Dried blood is the strange one, metallic where the dark rose is floral, and patchouli pulls both down into the earth. Incense and leather hold the end. Vetiver keeps it cold. Ambergris is the one soft thing in it.

Dark Tales began as a home hobby in Moscow in July 2019 and now works out of a studio and laboratory on Kungsgatan in Uppsala, Sweden. Arina P. Franzén founded it and composes everything in it, having come to fragrance out of history, psychology and biographical writing. Some things are too atmospheric to describe in words. Some memories do not speak, they smell, and that is the whole argument for the house.

Every release is built as a place rather than as a pleasant thing to wear. If one is named for an old library it has to smell like an old library, down to the dust and the slowed time. The work is handmade in small batches, roughly eighty percent natural, and it runs from luminous florals through smoky woods and resinous dark to industrial gourmand. None of it was made to disappear politely into a room.