Obsidian Apple Parfum

One wish, and the deepest secret paid for it.

In a grove nobody could find, on a gnarled age-old tree inside an ancient forest, hung a single black fruit, smooth as polished stone. The power in it was alluring and perilous at once. One wish to whoever dared pluck it, and in return the plucker's deepest secret told to the world. Someone brave enough went in one evening. The surface gleamed, a whisper ran through the trees, and by dawn the grove had gone still again.

Green fruit and sweet mint make the first minutes cold and crisp. White lily warms the middle, red berries keeping it tart rather than sugary. Benzoin, musk mallow and a light timber close it on a tender resinous warmth that makes the fruit read darker and more grown than it started.

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.