The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Ancient Woods Extrait de Parfum arrived in 2023 as part of Volume I, a numbered collection from perfumer Arina Franzén. Her practice is rooted in botanical perfumery, a discipline built around plant-derived materials and a respect for what they bring on their own terms. Ancient Woods channels that philosophy into a single, sustained image: the deep, resinous quiet of a northern forest floor, the kind you walk into alone and come out of quieter. The extrait concentration amplifies the materials in the composition, giving each one room to register as a distinct voice rather than a blended murmur. There's no rush in the formula, no top-heavy brightness designed to grab you from across a room.
What's interesting here is the structural choice. Franzén opens with just two materials, lemon and clary sage, then sends the composition into a densely resinous core where copaiba balsam, beeswax, and palo santo do the heavy lifting. That trio is unusual: copaiba brings a clean, almost medicinal warmth; beeswax adds skin-soft sweetness; palo santo contributes dry, slightly smoky wood. Stacking three resins-adjacent materials in the heart creates an almost architectural density that an extrait concentration can sustain without collapsing into heaviness.
The evolution
The first ten minutes belong to lemon and clary sage, bright and herbal, with a clean coolness that feels more morning-light than forest. That clarity doesn't last. By the thirty-minute mark, copaiba balsam arrives and the composition tilts resinous, warm, slightly sweet, with a green undertow that pulls you downward into the scent. Beeswax softens the edges. Palo santo adds a dry, almost incense-like smoke that lingers at the threshold of perception. Through hours two and three, the base materials settle in slowly: black spruce sharpens the wood note, oakmoss brings that unmistakable damp-earth quality, sandalwood rounds everything with its milky warmth. Spikenard and frankincense provide the long, quiet finish, deep, contemplative, faintly medicinal. The drydown is where this composition earns its name: pure, still forest, resin cooling in air.
Cultural impact
Ancient Woods Extrait de Parfum treats the forest not as scenery but as a moral and emotional landscape: a place where the human voice quiets and the older signals of trees, soil, and herb take over. There's a deliberate asceticism in the way the composition refuses to perform. It doesn't open with the loud citrus or aromatic sparkle that most modern launches reach for, and it doesn't traffic in the gourmands or ambroxan-forward skin scents that dominate counters and feeds. Instead it commits to a narrow palette of resins, woods, and earth materials, and asks the wearer to meet it on those terms.
The House
Arina FranzénArina Franzén is an independent, Sweden-based perfumer who operates two distinct fragrance lines from her studio in Uppsala: Arina Franzén Perfumery, her botanical and all-natural fragrance house, and Dark Tales (sold as ByDarkTales on Etsy), her mixed-media artisan perfumery label. Trained at the Natural Perfumers Academy, she creates both lines by hand, organizing her compositions into numbered Volumes rather than traditional product launches. With fragrances like Ancient Woods (2023), Tuberose Noir (2019), and Smoke & Mirrors, her work centers on natural materials and aromatic storytelling that blurs the lines between fine fragrance and sensory art.
The Creator
Arina FranzénSignature technique: botanical perfumery built from natural materials, composed with a novelist's patience and a horror fan's flair for atmosphere. Franzén works exclusively within the natural palette, coaxing depth from absolutes, resins, and tinctures rather than synthetics,…
