How Do You Smell Like A Beautiful Ghost?

What does a ghost smell like? It’s not exactly a question that comes up in everyday life. With fragrance brands taking inspiration from the undead, it’s surprisingly worth asking.

From Heretic’s Ghosts collection to witchy scents from Andrea Maack, Vyraou, and Dark Tales, perfumes are channeling spirits, vampires, and other supernatural beings. Imaginary Authors’ Impassable Wilderness, meanwhile, tells the tale of a sister looking for her baby brother, who was “snatched up by a murder of beady-eyed crows and carried away into the darkest depths of the forest,” per the brand. But how do you actually make a fragrance smell otherworldly?

A scent starts to smell eerie when familiar notes take an unexpected turn. “Take vanilla and remove its sweetness, surrounding it with smoke, wax, and cold woods,” says Douglas Little, the founder and master perfumer behind Heretic’s famously unconventional fragrances. The effect comes from playing with contrast and adding notes that don’t traditionally belong with gourmands, like petrichor or mushroom. “That, to me, is where something begins to feel haunted,” says Little. “It smells familiar, but you can’t quite explain why it’s making you uncomfortable.”

Perfumers also draw on other senses when translating the supernatural into scent. Stephen Nilsen, master perfumer at Swiss flavor and fragrance house Givaudan, describes the process as a form of synesthesia, in which ingredients evoke colors that help guide a fragrance’s composition. “A pumpkin is going to be these orange, pumpkin-y, spicy notes. A ghost is going to be things that are white,” he says, adding that “musks certainly — especially the ones that are more fluffy and ethereal — and then marshmallow notes — something sweet, something whipped, something vanilla — can also go into the ghost.”

“The best dark fragrances keep something warm and attractive at the surface, while something foreign or foreboding scratches underneath.”

So what do the supernatural actually smell like? According to Funmi Monet, founder of Influxious and ISIPCA-certified expert in French perfumery, it depends on the character. Witches tend to be a bit earthy and medicinal (think incense, patchouli, dirt), while ghosts often “smell” transparent, with light florals, wispy musks, and aldehydes. Vampires go sinister but sexy: “Give me dark rose, plum, cherry, or wine,” says Monet. Smoke, moss, leather, resins, and darker woods can conjure creepy settings like dusty libraries and abandoned churches.

Then there are the truly uncanny notes: the metallic tang of blood, a splash of gasoline, even fecal matter. Both Little and Nilsen independently suggested fecal notes as a way to introduce discord and create animalic, raw, almost horselike effects. Nilsen also describes aldehydes that conjure the image of a snuffed-out candle. “There are these long chain [fragrance] notes with an aldehyde at the end,” he says. “[They] smell like snuffed-out candles. So they have this feeling of almost like a woman in a gown, walking at midnight, carrying a candelabra.”

These accords demand a delicate balance. “The best dark fragrances keep something warm and attractive at the surface, while something foreign or foreboding scratches underneath,” says Kevin Keller, cofounder of fragrance brand Fulton & Roark. “Too much of the unknown or unpleasant, and it’s repulsive. Too little, and it’s anodyne.”

“It smells familiar, but you can’t quite explain why it’s making you uncomfortable.”

Interest in the supernatural extends beyond Halloween. According to Pinterest’s 2026 Hobbies Report, searches for “herbal apothecary” jumped 595%, while “learn astrology” surged 733%, pointing to growing interest in mystical practices and aesthetics beyond the spooky season. For perfumers, that fascination creates an opportunity to explore scents that feel unfamiliar, ambiguous, or transportive. “What I find exciting now is this appetite for ambiguity,” says Little. “Perfume is an extraordinary vehicle for world-building. Smell bypasses so much intellectual processing and goes directly into memory, emotion, and imagination. You can smell something and suddenly be somewhere that may not even exist.”

Perhaps that’s what makes haunted scents so compelling: They’re familiar enough to draw you in, yet strange enough to keep you guessing.

“You can’t see perfume once it’s on someone’s skin, but you know it’s there. There is already something slightly supernatural about that,” says Monet. “Fragrance lives between something physical and something emotional, so ghosts, witches, vampires, magic, and fantasy feel like a very natural language for perfumery.”