The days are getting shorter, the veil is growing thinner, which means it’s spooky season, baby! As a triple Scorpio and lover of the occult, I’ve always been obsessed with Halloween. It isn’t just a time to dress up as your favorite scary—or not so scary (looking at you, Gay Halloween)—character, but also the season of transition from light to dark. It’s time to get out the goth burgundy lip stain, put on the floor-sweeping vampiric coats, order a Trenta, no foam, five-shot, half-caf, no-foam pumpkin spice latte with no foam at 210 degrees, and watch The Craft for the 100th time.
Spooky smells have always been there—the smell of cold, crumbling gravestones, dripping blood, or a freshly blown-out candle in a pitch-black room—but they haven’t always been bottled. Thanks to social media, the last few years have seen the explosion of unsettling, creepy, and disgusting fragrances from an underground obsession to part of a mainstream scent wardrobe. Perfume is a sort of entity with a spookiness that naturally lends itself to horror: the abject, the unsettling, and that which surpasses rational understanding.
After all, perfume is an ancient alchemical art rooted in the arcane desire to cast a spell over our most primitive of senses. So whether you want to smell like a seductive witch for a season or a terrifying beast just for the full moon, it’s time to let perfume possess your soul.
Ahead, shop the spookiest perfumes to get you in the season’s mindset.
Coven Eau De Parfum
“It’s dirty but kind of fabulous as well,” Andrea Maack says of her namesake fragrance brand’s cult witch perfume Coven. The enveloping, earthy fragrance hovers between supernatural luminosity and primal sensuality with galbanum, clove, moss, and vanilla. “There’s nothing like it out there,” gothic perfume influencer Annabella La Chimia praises. “It's dark, damp and slightly boozy, like witches dancing barefoot (and naked) in a forest.”
After Hours Eau De Parfum
If perfume is a form of spellcasting, then Azzi Glasser harnesses its magic to help actors embody their characters, including working with Helena Bonham Carter for Bellatrix Lestrange. After Hours, from Azzi’s brand The Perfumer’s Story, is as close as you can get to the original bespoke potion, with accords of poisonous flowers linked to historical folklore and witchcraft.
Hexensalbe
Honoring the ferocity of witchcraft and taboo rituals of personal power, Stora Skuggan’s primordial Hexensalbe is a medicinal blend of darkly aromatic wormwood, liquorice, belladonna, and black hemlock. In the Middle Ages, hexensalbe salve - also known as witches’ flying ointment - was made with botanical extracts, resins, and fats. Rubbed intimately on the body, it reportedly induced a hallucinogenic trip with visions of otherworldly creatures, primal sexual hunger, and sensations of flying—hence the symbolism of a witch riding a broom.
Haxan
“I think the most terrifying thing a fragrance can do is make you question your own perception,” Douglas Little, founder of Heretic, tells me. Heretic is the indie fragrance house known for transforming the occult into the olfactory. Described by wearers as the perfect dark Victorian library scent, their ambery, rose and smoke-infused Häxan line was inspired by the namesake witchy Swedish-Danish silent horror film from 1922 - part historical essay, part unholy carnivalesque delirium.
Werwulf
After the success of Nosferatu, a gothic floral musk created in collaboration with director Robert Eggers and Focus Features for the eponymous 2024 film, Heretic’s latest release is Werwulf, another spooky Eggers collab.
“About a year ago, I first read Robert Eggers' script for Werwulf. I remember finishing it and feeling that I had just entered one of the darkest psychological horror landscapes I had ever encountered,” Douglas tells me.
Heretic’s Werwulf perfume collection creates olfactory tension between animalic facets, humid woods, musks, and earthy materials. “The line between man and beast isn't really a line at all. It's a psychological construct,” Douglas explains. “We like to believe that civilization has somehow separated us from our animal nature, but our instincts, appetites, fears, and desires are never very far beneath the surface.”
D.S. & Durga Resurrected Corpse Flower
We have an enduring fascination with perfumes that capture the macabre, with notes of everything from wet animal fur and burnt hair to blood, tears and rotting matter. DS & Durga’s Halloween release Resurrected Corpse Flower toes the line between the horrific and the romantic in seasonal style.
David Moltz smelled the rare corpse flower in bloom, a phenomenon that only happens every three to ten years for a mere 24 hours. “It was foul! Humid rotten garbage, cheese, a diaper pail in a rotten fish tank full of rubber lily bulbs and olives. But when you're a perfumer, even something that horrible is fascinating…” Moltz describes his olfactory creation as an imaginary resurrection, not a literal recreation. “It's what I imagine the corpse flower would smell like if it died, went underground, and came back as some magnificent white flower. I wanted the whole thing to smell like it had grown out of the same strange earth.”
Resurrected indeed.
Empty Wishes Well
What I find the most terrifying is the eerie; an unexplained noise in an empty house, the suffocating silence of being alone in dark woods, walking down an empty street at night and glancing over your shoulder with the feeling someone - or something - is following you. Toskovat’s Empty Wishes Well finds inspiration twofold, as the name would suggest. Wishing on a coin and throwing it into a well is folkloric superstition, but what lies at the bottom? Or, as perfumer David-Lev puts it, “how will we decompose towards the depths just like our wishes will?” The result is a truly eerie perfume of slimy cold stone, cobblestones in a cemetery, and the thrilling, chilling feeling of listening for a penny after you’ve thrown it, only for it never to hit the water. Maybe the scariest part is already on your skin.