Mlleghoul

There's a particular kind of gothic imagery that Black Death calls to mind: baroque church architecture in shadow, where stone angels tucked into dusty alcoves have awakened hungry, wings once outspread in reverence now twisted inward in sacrilege, enfolding flesh in the dark. A century's worth of prayer-stained marble suddenly weeping blood; an inverse of holiness; the stony flame of the frozen heart. Black Death is cold where it should be warm. Clove should read as warming spice but here it's numbing, that sharp eugenol prickling before the needle's sting, tingles cold and strange. The smoky haze of offerings burnt to forbidden names. Sweetness emerging from the dry smoke and numbing spice, out of place, a lure you know better than to follow but follow anyway. Temptation heavy and inescapable, smooth and terrible in its certainty, the sweetness of something you were always going to do. Desolation and eerie stillness, the chill of being found by what you've forever been circling. This is what it smells like to stop praying for the shadows to spare you and call them closer instead. Fear and desire meeting in the same alcove, two faces of one shadow. The darkness was coming regardless - might as well open the door to it yourself.

Sometimes a perfume surprises you by being something completely different from what you expected, and Heretic’s Häxan, rather than the poison gardens and shadow work that many reviewers experience, is, for me, pure romantic magic. Not exactly “Häxan”, but rather “en rosglitterkonfekthäxa” (a rosy-glitter-confection-witch).

That said, even though I’m getting something different, it’s still quite lovely! Candied rose petals, berries drizzled with golden honey, nibbled on a soft bed of moss, sugar-sweet, unabashedly pretty. It’s the ruffled and laced and beribboned fairy godmother, vanity glamour magic, the kind where you wave a wand and a ballgown appears, where you gesture and flowers spring up beneath your feet.

Soft things made strategic: looking-glass spells, prettiness as power, and potent magic. The preparation is the spell itself - sugar-glazed roses, berry-stained fingers, green things plucked from the forest, wild air lingering on her fingers. Beauty magic deployed with intent, strength dressed in sweetness and long, lingering kisses (and flowers and confections and tulle and tiaras and a sparkly wand.)

Dates soaking in over-brewed black tea, astringent and mouth-coating, that dry tannic bite married to sticky, crystallized sweetness. Dark musky honey, earthy and animalic, refined in the way something becomes after a thousand years of being wild - it evolved, got that shit out of its system. Heavy like a weighted blanket, enveloping, calming rather than crushing or claustrophobic.

This is the witch in the woods who turned out to be just a person whose heart was too good, whose reputation for darkness came from living apart, looking strange, choosing solitude. You went seeking magic or answers or maybe just got lost, and she poured you tea in a chipped Limoges cup, offered a shoulder to cry on, pulled out the good French biscuits kept for guests who never come. She wrapped you in a cashmere throw gone soft from years of use, pressed soft woolen slippers into your hands, gestured to the chair by the fire that's clearly the most cushy, cozy comfortable one. Abundance in unexpected places, richness where you thought there'd only be shadows.

It makes you feel powerful and protected simultaneously, wrapped in care that looks forbidding from the outside, but inside is all velvet cushions and warm stones and things worn soft by love. The sweetness and bitterness work together, sticky dates and bitter tea conspiring toward comfort, quiet luxury in weathered textiles and secret stores of good honey, the kind you'd want to find if the world got too sharp, too bright, too much. A dark, warm space that welcomes without questions, that knows what you need before you ask, will hide the bodies in the best places.

A little burlap sack of herbs, a little spell-bag, green, dry, peppery, sharp, that you tucked in the back of your freezer for safe-keeping. You forgot it entirely and found it freeze-dried and iced over hidden by a bag of peas years later and just in the corner beyond it, you see something strange. A shimmering-glimmering fissure, a glowing rift. What appears to be a portal in the very back of your frigidaire. Sea salt air wafts cleanly from it, cerulean waves dazzling in the far distance (is it ocean or alien horizon? unclear) and most peculiar, sandy pathy lined densely with something very much the shape of pine trees, fragrant boughs heavy with gleaming drifts of snow.

Haunted tiki bar, spectral mai tai floating in the periphery while some scratchy exotica album plays from a speaker you can’t locate, Martin Denny maybe, or Les Baxter’s jungle fantasies, that mid-century escapist thing that was already nostalgic for something that never existed, already haunted by its own appropriations, its own colonial fantasies dressed up as lounge entertainment, which is absolutely not what this fragrance is about but it’s where my nose took me, this tiki bar detour having nothing to do with the brand’s actual abandoned mansion concept.

The fruit here does exactly what I want fruit to do in fragrance, which is be weird about it, ashen and dusty and somber, bruised and semi-preserved like fruit that’s been drinking alongside the patrons, drifting in its own languid dissolution, melting into the upholstery, losing definition under hazy torch light, not trying to be fresh or bright or engaging, just strange and a little sad and smoky.

There’s a mustiness here, old wood and older paper, that particular smell of closed-up places where the air has gone stale and sweet at the same time, resort towns in the off-season where the bars are shuttered and the bamboo decorations gather dust and you can still smell a thousand phantom drinks soaked into the floorboards, lime and orgeat and something vaguely tropical gone sour in the humidity. Beach cottages abandoned after hurricane season, with everything softly deteriorating in the damp air, fruit bowls forgotten on kitchen counters, paperbacks yellowing and swelling and smelling like vanilla and wood pulp slowly decomposing, all of it fading together. This is October in places where October doesn’t mean sweaters, where fall is more conceptual than meteorological, where the season changes because the calendar says so, but the air is still thick and warm.

Something resinous and golden underneath, woody-amber earthiness, not cold-earth but tropical-earth, the smell of wood that’s never known frost, rooms that stay humid year-round, dust that never quite settles because there’s always moisture in the air. The smokiness like the ghost of a bar where fruits lounged and got tipsy, daddy-o, got a little loose, a little wild. The kind of abandoned that’s specific to semi-tropical places, where things don’t freeze and die back, but just slowly molder and transform, go spectral in the heat.