The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Black Licorice arrived in 2026 as part of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's The Vampire Lestat collection, a licensed collaboration with AMC tied to the third season of the Anne Rice adaptation. The fragrance was composed by Elizabeth Moriarty Barrial, the brand's owner and perfume maker. The collection draws directly from Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, and Black Licorice reads as a portrait of Lestat himself: opulent, seductive, and operating somewhere between decadence and danger. The formula pairs gourmand warmth with the kind of resinous, leathery base the house has built its reputation on. Barrial's approach to this particular composition treats scent as scene-setting on its own terms, building toward a specific kind of gothic indulgence.
What makes this composition worth attention is the tension between its top and its floor. The opening leans confectionary: black plum, licorice, champagne, the kind of notes that read as dessert on paper. But the base doesn't follow that script. Labdanum, benzoin, colophony, and leather drag the sweetness somewhere heavier, more sacred, almost liturgical. That contrast gives Black Licorice a duality that rewards revisiting. It's not a candy scent with a drydown. It's a candlelit room with a leather chair and something burning in the corner.
The evolution
On skin, Black Licorice opens with a burst of anise and black plum, sweet but sharpened by the licorice root's natural bitterness. The champagne note adds a brief effervescence in the first 20 minutes, almost fizzy, like the scent of a glass just poured. By the 30-minute mark the fruit deepens, the anise settles, and the resins begin their slow takeover. The heart phase, running roughly from hour one to hour three, is where benzoin and labdanum build their warm, almost honeyed architecture. Leather arrives here, not as a sharp saddle note but as something worn-in, close, and intimate. The drydown, starting around hour four, strips away the brighter top notes entirely. What's left is colophony and labdanum with a faint echo of plum, a warm resinous skin scent that lingers close to the body for another two to three hours. On fabric the base notes hold even longer. The next morning, the collar of a shirt will still carry that warm, smoky sweetness.
Cultural impact
Black Licorice sits within a long tradition of licensed fragrance tie-ins to television and literary properties, but the BPAL approach treats it less as merchandise and more as world-building. The Vampire Lestat collection, created alongside AMC's third season of the Anne Rice adaptation, draws on a community already fluent in gothic narrative and ritual-driven scent. This one fits that brief: a sweet, resinous composition that reads like a scene rather than a product.
