Yaga Parfum

A hut on crooked chicken legs, swaying in the moonlight.

The elders spoke of the witch in riddles and told the children never to go far from the village. The name was a shadow stretched across the darkest corners of the forest. The travelling was done at night, in a mortar, steered by the wind with a pestle alongside, and the windows of that hut flickered with a light nobody wanted to walk toward. People went looking anyway, wanting knowledge or wanting power. The twisted woods kept every one of them.

Black pepper and black currant hit first, sharp and green and fruity at once. Then juniper wood, then Siberian pine, and the whole thing turns into forest, cold and resinous and not remotely tame. Myrrh and benzoin warm the end with a dark balsamic sweetness, which is what makes something this cold and green also edible at the edges.

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.