The Witches Parfum

Not born, but summoned.

They were drawn out on frost-bound evenings, when the dark felt deliberate and the past pressed close enough to touch. No footsteps. The air went sour around them with smoke and resin, sweet at the edge and rotting under it, as though buried confessions had started breathing again. Anyone who met their gaze was opened up, old memories stirred like embers under ash. Some came back altered and undone, dreaming things that clung like velvet. Others had found a truth too intimate to survive the telling, and never spoke again.

Liquorice sits at the centre, deep and sweet and faintly sinister. Red mandarin and black cherry soften it, blackberry alongside, clove bud sharpening all three. Dark rose and blue chamomile bring the florals in shadowed rather than pretty. Fragonia and frangipani sit with them. Rosewood and guaiacwood close it smoky, and roasted seashells put a mineral edge under the whole thing.

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.