Heritage
A house, in its own words
Arina Franzén's path into perfumery runs through formal botanical training. She is a graduate of the Natural Perfumers Academy, an institution focused exclusively on natural and aromatic materials rather than mainstream synthetic formulation. Following her studies, she founded Arina Franzén Perfumery, a botanical line, and in parallel built Dark Tales Artisan Perfumery, which she markets online as ByDarkTales. Her earliest documented fragrance release, Tuberose Noir, dates to 2019, making her a relatively young founder within the independent perfume space. Her profile grew steadily through the early 2020s as she expanded both labels and began documenting her process publicly through social media and fragrance community interviews. In 2024, she was named Best Perfumer at Stockholm Beauty Week, an industry recognition that introduced her work to a wider Scandinavian and international audience. The same period also brought a distribution partnership covering the US market, reflecting demand that had built through her Etsy storefront and direct-to-consumer channels. Today she operates from Kungsgatan 66CB in Uppsala, Sweden, with the Arina Franzén Perfumery botanical line and the Dark Tales house functioning as two halves of a single creative practice. Her numbering system, with releases labeled Volume I, Volume II, and so on, gives the brands a collector-oriented architecture that mirrors the way independent perfumers often build catalog depth over years rather than seasons. Franzén's creative vision rests on a conviction that natural aromatic materials carry a depth and complexity that synthetics cannot replicate, and that this depth is worth the patience and unpredictability that botanical perfumery demands. She frames her practice as creating 'aromatic illusions with natural materials,' language that signals an interest in atmosphere and narrative over straightforward olfactory reproduction. Rather than chasing mass-market appeal, she leans into a certain strangeness, working with raw materials in forms (tinctures, absolutes, distillates) that retain more of their original character than heavily processed aroma chemicals. A core principle across both her houses is honesty about ingredients. Her botanical line is positioned as entirely natural, and even within Dark Tales, where the mixed-media mandate allows some flexibility, she emphasizes transparency about what goes into each composition. She has spoken about preferring real tuberose over the synthetic reconstructions common in commercial fragrance, an attitude that runs through her Volume releases. Ultimately, her work treats perfume less as a beauty product and more as an immersive object. The naming choices (Smoke & Mirrors, Queen of Thorns, Katholikon, Renaissance) reflect an interest in story, mythology, and emotional register, suggesting that she sees each bottle as the beginning of a world the wearer is invited to step into rather than a simple scent to apply.