Fragrance Profiles: The Veil by Heretic Parfum

This post contains an affiliate link and commission codes.

Originally released in a limited collection of fragrances done in collaboration with The Kunstmuseum, The Veil is one of five scents included in Heretic Parfum’s Ghosts Discovery set. Luckily, they released these scents in a larger size, and I snagged The Veil.

Yay, Wolf.

All of the fragrances in the set were great. They were technically and artistically great. I could say more, and I almost certainly should, but this profile isn’t about them.

No, this is about The Veil—a fragrance that stands out, and not just amongst the four (technically three) other ghostly scents it was crafted alongside. Rather it stands out amongst every perfume I’ve reviewed this year.

When I first smelled this fragrance, one thing came to mind: spirit photography. Ghostly orbs and shadows that droves of curious people have attempted to capture from even the earliest days of the camera’s invention. Spirit photography is a fascinating byproduct of a deeply human desperation, the desperation to prove something. We wanted empirical evidence of a world we move alongside, but cannot see or touch. And in our desire to capture what we feel is there—what we know is there—but cannot prove is there, people started doing something so simple it almost feels silly. We thought well, if we can’t see it, maybe this heap of metal and glass can.

Now, whether or not you believe that the spirit world can be captured with a good lens or on a handy dandy Polaroid (shake it REAL hard) well, that’s your business. The world of spirit photography is rife with fraud. Then again, what world isn’t? There are thousands of fake ghost photos. Created with glass and mirrors and people in costume and now, in the modern age, they’re created in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee with the help of photoshop and AI.

But for every thousandth fake, photo one thousand and one comes along and shakes you of your skepticism. One photo in a sea of dust speck orbs and greasy fingerprint smudge apparitions stops you in your tracks and makes you think—Jesus Christ, I’m looking at a dead man.

The Veil is photo one thousand and one.

I wish I was a better writer, one who could have gotten to this point faster, but it is what it is.

This fragrance captures what we cannot. Ethereal, beautiful, and deeply unsettling, The Veil is all contradictions. It isn’t a warm fragrance or a cooling fragrance. There is something briefly animalic about it, but that itself is a fleeting experience, and one that I might be imagining. There is a note of soil or dirt, but not really. It’s more like there’s a note that evokes the feeling of seeing a footprint in the mud, in the middle of a forest—a forest that you shouldn’t necessarily be in.

The star of this show is matsutake mushroom, and I will be making it my business to get ahold of every fragrance that features this note because I am now a little bit obsessed with it. Matsutake mushrooms have a spicy, musty kind of smell, with some people noting that the older mushrooms possess a fleshy, vaguely fishy smell. Fret not, The Veil has the fleshy, earthy vibe, not the fishy, fleshy one.

Mushrooms occupy a weird middle-ground as they’re not animal or plant, and they’re so goddamn weird, and the things that they get up to are, again, so goddamn weird. Tangentally related, but I’ve been in a quantum biology rabbit hole lately, and I am now suspicious of mushrooms. Regardless, the mushroom note in this scent is doing A LOT of walking and talking, and I think it is responsible for The Veil’s eerie vibe.

Now what really trips me out about this fragrance, besides the fact that its drydown smells exactly like the perfume my very dead great grandmother wore, is the fact that, if I was blindfolded, gun to my head, I would swear that there was a white floral in this fragrance.

So this was longwinded and, if you’re really into Brown Sugar Vanilla body spray, it may have read as being less than complimentary, but The Veil is truly something special. It captures the strange knowing that many have felt and attempted to get proof of, the strange knowing that something else is here, in the corner of our eyes and just out of our reach.

Shop the discovery set HERE.

Use code WOLFINLACE20 for 20% off