Halloween Aromatics

Halloween Aromatics

Anyone who knows DS & Durga knows that we take Halloween pretty seriously. It’s been 3 years now that we have made a limited-edition fume for one of our favorite holidays. Kavi (the Durga of DSD) is a true goth. I’m from the town next to Salem Mass where Halloween lives year round.

Every October I pull out the HP Lovecraft, Poe, C.A. Smith & the like. The Misfits come on the radio. We let the kids cover our stoop with webbing and spiders. It’s a month of cosplay for sure, but one of the most subtle, impactful ways to get in the spirit is with scents – Aromatic Cosplay if you will. I’ve made 4 Halloween perfumes; here’s a rundown of the ghosts of DSD’s Halloween past & present.

HANDBOOK OF THE RECENTLY DECEASED was released a few years back.  I have now updated it & renamed it more accurately SPECTRAL DOORWAY. It is a fragrance that attempts to capture that moment in Beetlejuice where Bill and Lydia draw a door in chalk on the brick wall in the attic, knock three times, and open a portal to the other world. The ghostly light and spectral fumes emanating just past the door always intrigued me. And of course, they got the formula to transport to the land of the dead from the Handbook. I used aromatic materials that are very liminal – smelling like they’re not part of our world, or at least that they’re on the fringes of another one.

The dominant accords of Spectral Doorway is a signature blend of materials that smell like wispy white smoke. Guaiacol is the smell of a sniffed out candle on its way to becoming marshmallows. It is perplexing to the human nose. It doesn’t have the harsh bite of real smoke, but it certainly is smoky.  It doesn’t have the sweetness of vanilla, but it is certainly in the ballpark. It’s a strange aroma that is unsettling and familiar.

Artemisia is another liminal note.  It has lots of associations to spooky stuff in the witchy world of Earth mama cults Mugwort & other artemisias are common in the roadside scree.  They smell fruity green & bitter - almost toxic - the fringes of the wayside becoming the edges of our safe world. The strange & unusual aroma of dangerous herbs is perfect for denoting borderlands, like the spectral doorway in Beetlejuice.

Musk and Ambergris are some of the most important materials in perfumery. They are liminal molecules that exist on the fringes of what humans can smell.  You could spend years as a perfumer, working out novel uses for these two materials in any perfume. In Spectral, I took the dryer notes of ambergris to support the white smoke and the soft purple of the musk Ambrettolide, which usually comes from shellac - a resin made by beetles! That way, you actually have some beetle’s juice supporting the ghostly fumes on the other side of that door.

SEXY VIKING was our Halloween Studio Juice in ’22. One of the more humorous sides of Halloween is the bastardization of traditional costumes done “sexy.” Kavi and I had a long running joke that the most ridiculous name ever for a perfume would be Sexy Viking. I started the first trials with the materials a real Viking woman might use – perhaps making concoctions with plants of the Scandinavian-Baltic regions in the 10th century.  Black currant had to be there - barley grass, juniper, & ash wood (which was used extensively in building badass Viking boats) too. The twist to the juice is this: I turned these “Viking” notes on their head to make Sexy Viking perform like a trashy mall fragrance - which is where you would find a plastic & polyester “Sexy Viking” costume.

For SALEM GOTHIC, I really wanted to highlight the juxtaposition between one of the most authentic witchy places in our country with the reality of what Salem is. In Salem, cold North Atlantic winter winds bring salted sea air to the nose.  Salem has gorgeous Colonial architecture, spooky graveyards, real haunted houses, & legit witches who practice Wicca. But it is also pretty commercial.  I was a skater kid in High School and hung with many purple haired goths who loved to read occult books at the food court in the death mall. So, as in Sexy Viking, in Salem Gothic I played with those contrasts. I took frosty flowers, lichen in the graveyard, witchy herbs & cold ocean winds, but dressed them in youthful sweet violet like Hot Topic kids hanging out in the cemetery at night.

I have been working on a werewolf fragrance for a long time, but it ain’t done yet. I’ve been trying to make it smell brown & hairy but sophisticated like an English werewolf in the 19th century or the 1920s. Some things it needs to contain: amber, cistus, animalics like castoreum & civet. I also have a vampire fragrance I’m tinkering with. I’ve tried to capture the bloody smell of a vampire's breath & the dressy black eveningwear you spot on many a Nosferatu – I think I might have just nailed it! Hopefully I’ll get one of them done for 2025!  I would love a whole line of ghosts & ghouls for the year-round fiends one day.  Happy Halloweener y’all!