Heretic Parfum has been a best-selling brand for us since the day we started stocking it at Lore Perfumery, and was our number one brand both in-store and online in 2025.
Look, it’s hardly a shock – Heretic exemplifies all the things we care about most when it comes to fragrance. It’s a perfume house with incredible attention to detail: from their concepts to their storytelling, from their packaging to the way their fragrances actually smell. They go way beyond traditional expectations of what a perfume might be, and create olfactory art that actually makes you feel something.
We wanted to know how on earth they do this, so last year, we had a bit of a chat with the founder and perfumer behind Heretic Parfum, Douglas Little, to gain a bit more of an insight into what makes him (and the brand) tick.
WHY THE HYPE?
One reason we believe Heretic has developed such a cult following at Lore is the intensely spiritual, witchy, and occult-inspired vision that shapes both the concepts behind and execution of their fragrances. We asked Douglas where the idea to found a brand so informed by these themes came from.
“Scent, for me, has always been a form of ritual, a way of bridging the seen and unseen. When I founded Heretic, I wanted to move beyond perfume as mere adornment and into something more alive, more intentional. Ayurveda taught me that botanicals carry energy, not just aroma, and that blending them is an act of balance, of body, mind, and spirit… Ultimately, my spirituality is the compass for my creative work. Perfume, to me, is prayer in liquid form, an offering, a spell, a whisper to the divine.”
INTEGRITY, PERFORMANCE AND THE PLANET
It only makes sense then that the other major thing that sets Heretic apart is the use of naturals in their fragrances. At the time the brand launched in 2016, Heretic was one of the only fragrance houses in the world who were producing plant-based niche, luxury fragrance. For Douglas, the reasoning for this was simple: integrity, performance and the planet.
“I began 100% natural to prove it could be beautiful. As we grew, I started using safe, bio-identical synthetics (often from renewable feedstocks) because they let me:
- Protect biodiversity (no pressure on fragile crops; no overharvesting).
- Reduce allergens/toxins versus some naturals at high dose, and meet global safety standards.
- Improve artistry, longevity, sillage, and textures naturals can’t always deliver.
- Ensure consistency & traceability despite climate-shocked harvests.
- Everything remains plant-based, cruelty-free, and responsible – I just added ethically made molecules as another brush on the palette so the work can be both sensual and sustainable.”
THE FIRST BIG COLLAB WITH THE QUEEN OF BURLESQUE
Speaking of sensuality, the first best-selling Heretic fragrance at Lore was Scandalwood, a collaboration with the talented and glamorous burlesque icon, Dita Von Teese. We asked Douglas what working with her on Scandalwood was like.
“Ah, Dita is pure alchemy in human form. Collaborating with her on Scandalwood was like creating a scent for a secret film noir no one was ever meant to see. She arrived with an exquisite sense of detail – lace gloves, red lips, and a mind full of velvet and mystery. We spoke less about notes and more about mood: candlelight on skin, the hush of silk, the whisper of forbidden things. From that, Scandalwood was born – smoky, sensual, unapologetically intimate.”
THE BIGGEST RELEASE EVER
While Scandalwood was our best-seller for years, another collaboration has well and truly usurped it popularity-wise, becoming not only our best-selling Heretic fragrance, but our best-selling fragrance storewide. We’re talking, of course, about Nosferatu. Released in 2024 to coincide with the release of Robert Eggers’ synonymous film, through Nosferatu, Douglas brought film to life in the form of scent.
500 bottles and counting…
“Nosferatu was born from our collaboration with Robert Eggers’ reimagining of the classic film. I was captivated by its desaturated, 19th-century palette, those brief flashes of light against an ocean of shadow, and I wanted to translate that visual tension into scent. I imagined what a vampire might truly smell like: lilacs crushed beneath cold stone, iron, candle smoke, and the faint sweetness of decay. It’s both beautiful and unsettling, a perfume that lingers somewhere between life and afterlife.”
THE TREND: FILM & FRAGRANCE
This isn’t the only Heretic fragrance inspired by film though – one of their more recent releases, HÄXAN, is inspired by a groundbreaking movie of the same name that came out in the 1920s. Douglas was able to give us some insight into (what we can only imagine was the very difficult) process of creating fragrance not only inspired by film, but imbued with the very essence of it:
“When I translate a film into scent, I’m not trying to replicate it, I’m trying to summon its spirit. I’ll watch the film obsessively, yes, but what I’m really doing is listening: to the silence between scenes, the textures of light and shadow, the emotional temperature that lingers after the credits roll. For HÄXAN, that 1922 fever dream of witchcraft and hysteria, I wanted the perfume to feel like celluloid melting, ancient, erotic, and otherworldly. The process became a séance: layers of smoke, ink, ritual herbs, and the faint metallic pulse of something forbidden. With Nosferatu, it was similar, less about fangs and fear, more about the ache of longing, the sensuality of decay. Each film gives me an atmosphere, a mythology, and my job is to distil that into something you can wear, something that haunts the skin like a memory you can’t quite place.”
SOMETHING SACRED TANGLED WITH SOMETHING SINFUL
Of course, we couldn’t talk to Douglas without putting him in an impossible position and making him pick a favourite child. We asked him what the one Heretic fragrance he couldn’t live without was.
“I love all my children, but I’m especially partial to Midnight Toker. It was inspired by my teenage years, steeped in Siouxsie and the Banshees, death rock nightclubs, and the swirling fog of clove cigarettes and black eyeliner. That world of beautiful decay still runs through everything I create. Midnight Toker carries that same pulse: a little danger, a little seduction, something sacred tangled with something sinful. It’s like a Bauhaus bassline translated into scent, hypnotic, melancholic, and just slightly feral. Every time I smell it, I’m right back there.”
BEAUTY AND DECAY, THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE
Obviously since Douglas created all of the Heretic fragrances, he wouldn’t have a least favourite. Instead, we wanted to know what fragrance/s were the most difficult for him to create.
“Coeur Noir and Poltergeist were probably the most challenging to create.
Coeur Noir feels like a portrait of my inner landscape, dark, romantic, and a little dangerous, a heart that beats within the tension between light and shadow. Poltergeist, by contrast, captures the essence of transformation and unseen presence, that lingering energy left behind after something, or someone, has moved through. Together, they embody both flesh and phantom, the eternal duality I’m drawn to in my work: beauty and decay, the sacred and the profane.”
STRONGEST OLFACTORY MEMORY
Lastly, we had to ask Douglas the most important question of all, and the question that we think defines a perfumer. What is his strongest olfactory memory and how did it shape him?
“When I was a kid, my mom used to take me to garden centers, and we had this little game. She’d pinch the leaves of different plants and ask me to identify them by scent, if I guessed right, I’d earn a dollar. I became fascinated by the idea that every plant carried its own invisible signature, its own secret identity. That was the moment scent became both magic and memory for me, and I’ve never looked back.”
We want to thank Douglas for taking the time to answer our questions, and for giving us such deep and intimate insight into the world of Heretic Parfum. We absolutely adore the brand here at Lore, and are so proud to have been the first Australian stockists of the brand.
