Witching Hour Parfum

Cocoa and coffee, taken down into the forest floor.

Twilight, and the shadows start moving on their own. Cloaked figures working under a moon that gives no comfort, the air humming with things half said. Ancient powers whispering somewhere out past the treeline, and the boundary between one part of the night and the next dissolving entirely. Magic in the flicker of a candle, for whoever is brave enough to look at it.

Cocoa and coffee bean come first over a gentle smoke, warm and edible. Tonka holds that a while, fermented mate stops it sweetening, nagarmotha turns it rootier. Then the forest arrives. Fir balsam and black spruce run cold, oakmoss and cypress make it damp, and autumn leaves turn up as it settles. On some skin there is a brief phase where it goes frankly mushroomy, and it earns that.

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.