Heretic Parfum’s Douglas Little crafts fragrances that breathe, shapeshift, and flirt with the dark. We caught up with him on Black Salt, rewriting summer, and how a perfume earns its goth stripes.
Q: Petrichor ranks just below “baby” on the impossibly hard-to-capture smells scale. How did you do it?
Douglas:I don’t think petrichor is necessarily a difficult note to capture. It’s more that it’s having a moment—kind of the way Palo Santo was a few years ago, when suddenly it was everywhere. Now petrichor feels like the new Palo Santo. It’s become one of those concepts that every perfumer interprets in their own way, like how we all approach gourmands or ambers.
For me, I love giving our customers what I want out of a fragrance: an unapologetic petrichor note. The molecule responsible for that scent is called geosmin, and it’s found in dirt—it becomes airborne when it gets wet. That’s what we recognize as the smell of rain hitting the ground. It’s earthy, grounding, a little dirty (in the best way).
I find it intoxicating. Honestly, when I go to the nursery for mulch, I’ll bury my face in a fresh bag just to take in that smell—it’s grounding, oddly erotic, and wonderful. I’ve been weaving that note into several of our fragrances. Nosferatu used it in a softer, more transparent way—almost lacy—blending with lilac and violet to feel watery and ghostly. In Black Salt, I pushed it harder: earthier, more mineralic, almost volcanic.
Petrichor itself is an accord, made up of about six different notes, and every perfumer pushes and pulls them differently, depending on the story they’re telling.
Q: How and when did you decide that Black Salt needed a wet lava rock note?
Douglas: I was really transfixed by the idea of rewriting what a summer fragrance could be. Summer isn’t a strong season in perfumery, and I wanted to change that for Heretic. I’ve also been embracing my gothic roots unapologetically, and it’s been really fun.
The truth is, I’m not a summer person. As a goth teenager, the beach sounded like a nightmare. But I thought, what if we retold that story from my perspective? What if Black Salt captured my kind of beach—overcast, maybe haunted by dead pirates, preferably in Scotland?
I started visiting the beach at dusk and at night, and I realized how dramatically the scent shifts. When the air cools, the plankton, the brine—everything changes. That’s what I wanted to capture. The result is something volcanic, mineralic, even a little chilly.
I used eucalyptus, something I almost never do, to create that cooling effect. It gives Black Salt this crisp, oceanic edge without actually smelling like eucalyptus. It’s one of the few Heretic fragrances that plays in that marine, ozone space, yet it still feels dark and mysterious, like incense wafting across the beach at night.
Q: What’s the most uplifting scent in the world, and why does it lift you?
Douglas:For me, it’s rose absolute. I have a real affinity for it, and it’s been scientifically proven to change brain chemistry, creating feelings of optimism, happiness, and well-being.
Most people think they know what rose smells like, but real rose absolute is completely different. When people smell it for the first time, they’re usually overwhelmed, it’s rich, emotional, and deeply human.
Q: Describe what beauty smells like for you.
Douglas: Beauty smells like strangeness. For me, beauty isn’t about symmetry or perfection, it’s about something that’s thought-provoking and unexpected. Something that makes you pause and think. That’s what draws me in.
Q: If Black Salt had a soundtrack, what would it be?
Douglas: Definitely Tones on Tail, an offshoot of Bauhaus. I listened to them constantly while working on Black Salt. Their sound is what I’d call California Gothic, this surfy dissonance that’s dark, beautiful, and hypnotic. It inspired the entire mood of the fragrance.
Q: All of the scents in the Beach Goth set are hauntingly beautiful. How do you decide if a scent passes the goth vibe check?
Douglas: It has to be immersive. It has to take you somewhere.
Take Bloodberry, for example, it’s actually a fairly uplifting scent, but hidden beneath the bright grapefruit and cassis is a dying rose note, grounded by vetiver. It’s that touch of decay, that whisper of something fading, that makes it goth.
Even when we do lighter, more optimistic fragrances, they still have to take you on a journey. That’s when I know it passes the goth vibe check.
