Chelsea Wolfe in the Heretic Parfum Ghosts campaignHeretic ParfumBreezy. Diaphanous. Vaporous. Ethereal. Transparent. Sparkling. Spectral. Lyrical. These are words that are often used to describe summer fragrances. But they’re also go-to adjectives for ghosts. Until now, there wasn’t much overlap between the two, until Douglas Little, Founder, Creative Director and Perfumer of Heretic Parfum, created Spectral Summer, a summer fragrance collection with spirits as its unlikely muse for the season.“The world of fragrance and the world of ghosts and apparitions seem like the same language, being that they're invisible and have this ability to create the idea of sensation,” Little says. “During this time of year, fragrance is a sticky subject because you don't want anything that's going to be too heavy or too cloying, and I loved the idea of approaching a summer collection based on these scent apparitions. It was interesting to explore these transparent notes through this idea of a spectral summer.”Chelsea Wolfe holding the Ghosts Discovery SetHeretic Parfum A collaboration between Heretic and the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland sparked the concept. The museum had an exhibit called “Ghosts” about five different paranormal activities and asked Little to create fragrances to accompany the exhibit. “They treated it extremely academic, and it was not at all anything haunted house related,” Little says. “It was from the concept of ghosts as a phenomenon, whether you believed it or not. They traced it all the way back to the Middle Ages with documented stories and did this interesting study of it. They had very specific requests going along with each exhibit, and so once that exhibit concluded, I was excited to take this concept and bring it full tilt again.”Spectral Summer consists of five new fragrances, tucked into a beautiful box with a booklet explaining the history, inspiration and notes for each perfume. “Talking about ghosts during the summer is certainly an extremely Heretic thing to do, and there's something quite interesting about approaching ghosts during the summer,” Little says. “Typically, when people develop fragrance collections around summer, the mood is about being beachy and fun, and I approached these fragrances from the stance of something that was quite brooding. They have a sense of melancholy to them that is interesting to explore through scent. Each scent explores a different facet from our past that tend to haunt us into the future, and this was something that was present while I was building these scents, creating that feeling of someone, a sense of longing, a sense of romantic loss, the idea of being away from a lover, these types of feelings of loss and yearning.”Heretic Parfum DoppelgangerHeretic ParfumWhen Little is building a scent, he often turns to cinema or music for inspiration. In this case, he listened to Chelsea Wolfe’s music while he was in the early stages of development. He asked her to be the face of the campaign. “I was surprised that she was so excited and was a fan of the brand and what really blew me away was when we got on the phone and she goes, ‘one of the big reasons I wanted to do this was that my new album is based on ghosts and this idea of things from the past that tend to appear in our future,’” Little says. “We were speaking from the same point of view. Obviously, her space was about sound and mine was about scent, and this was a dream collaboration of these two ephemeral worlds coming together.”For the campaign images, Little looked to Caspar David Friedrich, one of his favorite 19th century painters whom he admires for his moody dark blue landscapes. “Chelsea feels very modern and also very vintage at the same time, and I wanted to capture that strange polarity,” he says. “Casper David Friedrich’s work focuses on these spaces that feel immersed in a kind of gloom, and I wanted these images to feel strange and dissident. I wanted her to feel powerful and modern, and also very romantically charged, all at the same time. The water images that we did with her were some of my favorite because they create the feeling that I was hoping for. I was interested in capturing her reflection in water and also seeing what we could do with sheer fabrics that were wet in creating something that felt very ectoplasmic in the world around her. These images have a haunting quality to them. I wanted it to feel as if she was lost in this strange void, playing with the idea of a purgatory space.”Chelsea Wolfe in the Heretic Ghosts campaignHeretic ParfumLittle aimed to create something for everyone in Spectral Summer. Each parfum has a spectral musk accord that’s a combination of safe synthetic and naturally occurring musks that create unique sensations. “Some notes, for instance eucalyptus and mint, are used in some of these fragrances not for their ability to create an herbal note, but to create a cooling sensation in the scent, and so it creates this uneasy sense that’s like these skin prickles that we get, and it's done in a way that it's woven very carefully, because too much starts to smell like an essential oil,” he says. “You get this strange lyrical effect that is so beautiful and also keeps them light.”A huge fan of vintage perfumes, Little had a hard time finding an interesting contemporary lily of the valley perfume, so he created one with Spectral Grace. The note was very popular with Victorian women during the turn of the century, and its demand started to fade during the 20s. “It represented innocence and you just don't see it anymore,” Little says. He merged it with petrichor notes that appear in Nosferatu, like dust and ambergris, yet the perfume is very feminine. “It’s the perfect fragrance for an elegant weird girl, for someone who wants to wear a beautiful gown and wants old world refineries, but in a modern take.”Heretic The Veil parfumHeretic ParfumDoppelganger smells like heated skin. “I wanted to do something that was very much inspired by the word ‘doppelganger,’ which means a second self,” Little says. “It’s got a very interesting sandalwood accord that I built at the base of it with musks. It's soft and lyrical and strange; when you wear it, it appears and disappears. It’s comforting and discomforting at the same time because you feel like there's someone else in the room with you when you're wearing it, which is part of working with a violet iodine that's layered underneath the sandalwood.”The name of Ektoplasma became known with Ghostbusters, but initially the term was popularized during the Victorian period during the rise of spiritualism. “A lot of the mediums would document these ectoplasmic substances that were being emitted from their body while they were doing spirit contact, so I wanted Ektoplasma to be something that was of the flesh and also of the spirit, so the way I did that was I built a lactonic floral,” Little says. “When you snap the stems of some florals, like daisies and dandelions, they emit this kind of white, sticky sap. This was inspired by that. It has a green, slightly floral note to it that is combined with a very big dust accord, and when it starts to dry down, it smells like an old dusty attic. It's wonderfully curious and not off-putting. It opens up with something that a lot of people will find welcoming for the summer, which is a beautiful green, snappy, sticky floral, and then it dries into this wonderful warm, woody, dusty note, so it straddles that line of being strange and also wearable.”Chelsea Wolfe in the Heretic Ghosts campaignHeretic ParfumLittle notes that The Veil is another beautiful summer scent that smells like wet fog. “It’s such a beautiful take on petrichor,” he says. “It truly smells like gray sheer fabric or gray organza; it's elegant and very non-gendered.” Then there’s Shadow People, which pays homage to lost spirits who can't find their way back into the light. “It creates a sense of unease, almost as if you've seen something out of the corner of your eye, like you're not quite alone. I worked with a very dark green accord that sits at the base and it's woven with a petrichor note as well. It has this very strange, haunting, wet green quality to it.”The fragrances will also be sold separately in larger sizes. Heretic made custom caps for them in white ombre so that they feel like little apparitions. Spectral Summer is meant to be about more than just fragrance. It’s a deep dive into the collection and history around ghosts. The booklet is reminiscent of liner notes in a beautiful music album and even includes instructions on how to layer fragrances. For example, “Haunting Presence” instructs people to combine The Veil, Spectral Grace and Shadow People, explaining, “the layering moves from luminosity to ambiguity, elegance fading slowly into atmosphere.” Little wrote the copy himself and his cousin, Dustin Arnold, took the photographs. Heretic made 20,000 discovery sets and the images are hand glued into the pages of every single one.“I keep trying to raise the bar and get our packaging better and better,” Little says. “My cousin is a very celebrated creative director and we have an almost identical aesthetic. There's a synergy between us that is true magic. Dustin brings a level of such high standards with typography, placement, layout, design, and color palettes. When we combine efforts, it's like we're taking these very fringey concepts and turning them into something that feels extremely academic, profound and of value. We are in such a weird and challenging time financially, and when people are willing to spend $55 for a discovery set, I want to give them something that is not just [small perfume bottles] tossed into a box, meaning that there's true consideration behind it, and that I can give someone maybe five minutes, maybe it's an hour, or maybe it's an evening with friends, where you have wine and talk about fragrance, and the conversation spurs around to ghost stories. What a fun way of having a summer; that's bigger than just something cosmetic.”