What does a ghost smell like? Or dragon’s blood or a haunted crypt? How about Gwenyth Paltrow’s vagina? Or Nosferatu himself? The vampire smells like wilting lilacs, petrichor and ambergris, according to perfume brand Heretic Parfum, which created a special fragrance in partnership with the 2024 Robert Eggers film. And Paltrow’s vagina exudes Damask rose, ambrette and cedar – at least according to This Smells Like My Vagina, the candle she created in partnership with Heretic.

As for the ghosts, the brand has dedicated a range of five fragrances to answering that question. There’s Shadow People, with cold vapour, oakmoss, static electricity and damp earth. Doppelgänger consists of sheer woods and a skin-like musk. Spectral Grace, based on the ghost of Grace Kelly, combines lily of the valley with petrichor. The range was originally made for the Kunstmuseum Basel’s academic exploration of the paranormal in Switzerland, and founder Douglas Little set his mind to reconfiguring the first formulas to make something truly extraordinary. 

These Summertime spirits are not a campy Halloween novelty but a genuinely elevated selection that’s fresh and full of life – with something sinister lying beneath. Forget whatever clichéd image the term ‘goth collab’ conjures in your mind (it’s not Nightmare Before Christmas), and imagine if Tom Ford or Byredo got spooky with it. Combining beautifully unique scents with darkly rich worldbulding, this is high-end macabre. 

Take Häxan, for example, a velvety narcotic scent with fossilised amber and damp oakmoss inspired by a 1922 Swedish film which charts the historical roots of paganism and witchcraft. “A perfume of spellwork and shadow, conjured from roots, resins and relics, Häxan is […] born of poison gardens and scared groves, of druid stones and smouldering altars,” reads the evocative description. 

“I was taught at a young age that I needed to make my own reality,” says Little. Born to artist photographer parents and growing up as a pale redhead with no siblings in Southern California, he never felt like he belonged. A breakthrough came when he discovered the power of perfume to transport him out of his own inner world and into another space entirely – a magic which worked on others too.

“This has been a lifelong journey for me,” he says over Zoom. “I grew up as a gothic teenager and now, as a gothic adult, I love the culture.” Crediting his Scottish grandmother’s tales of brownies [a mischievous household spirit] and selkies [a kind of mythical shapeshifter, which appear as either seals or beautiful women] with his early interest in storytelling, he fell in love with the beauty and elegance of gothic romance. The brand came about when he realised that no-one was authentically bringing that feeling into fragrance.

Entirely self-funded and with an alternative, punk-like ethos, the Heretic line is both explicitly gender-neutral and made using almost entirely natural ingredients. “There’s some ingredients that do these wild effects,” Little says, comparing them to magic in a bottle. “This molecule called Violet Ionone blows my mind: the human brain first detects a soft, musky flora but on second inhale, the brain no longer registers it and about three minutes later it resets.” The haunting deja vu effect is what makes Doppelgänger, from the Ghosts collection, so unique. 

When it came to the visuals of the Ghosts range, Little turned to musician Chelsea Wolfe. Because Wolfe had had such a profound impact on his creative process, he sent her a cold email on the off-chance she would like to be directly involved. Surprisingly, she responded the next day. “The inspirations behind the scents were very similar to my own inspirations for my new album,” says Wolfe, citing as an example the ancestral work she’s been doing in her spiritual practice. Tracks like "The Dark" and "Death is Not the End" from the album, which is released in August, are similarly moody. “It felt very synchronistic!”

Wolfe’s own upbringing was filled with fragrances thanks to her grandmother, who studied aromatherapy and would craft her custom scents. As she got older, she found herself “intuitively” doing the same. “I love how scent can transport you,” she tells Dazed. “It’s very powerful”. It was her own relationship with the paranormal that first set her on the path of becoming an artist. “I had a strong experience with a haunted keyboard when I was 11 years old that opened me up to the notion of another realm within our own, and became an initial guide on my music journey.”  

Listening to Wolfe’s music at deafening levels brought Little to an uncomfortable space of grief for his mother, who had died twenty years prior. “I had so many afternoons where I was in a puddle of tears, realising how much of her life is within me and still continues forwards,” he says. “That’s when I started to think about these formulas in a different way: [less about the paranormal] and more, how do these things from our past haunt us years later?” The act of finding fragrant notes that were able to push, pull and evoke memories is where the collection really started to take shape. “Music can do that. A good perfume can do that.”