The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Gretel takes its name from the witch's undoing. The girl who walked into the house made of cake and candy, and walked out having set the whole thing ablaze. That's not a origin story for the faint-hearted, and neither is this fragrance. Criminal Elements built it from gingerbread spices and tobacco, incense and hay: the edible warmth of something you'd want to trust, and the smoke that proves you shouldn't have. It's a fairy tale told in three notes: sweet, smoky, gone.
What makes Gretel work is the structural tension between its top and base. The opening is almost aggressively cozy, all cinnamon and clove, the smell of something baking. But Corey Newcombe doesn't let that last. Incense enters the conversation early, bringing a resinous darkness that shifts the register entirely. By the time tobacco settles in, you're not in a kitchen anymore. You're somewhere with the windows open and the fire still going. The tonka bean doesn't sweeten the landing, it deepens it, adding a vanillic warmth that reads more amber than dessert. Hay appears in the base like a memory of the outdoors, grounding the smoke so it doesn't lift away.
The evolution
The opening hits fast, gingerbread spices in under thirty seconds, the kind of immediacy that feels intentional rather than aggressive. The cinnamon reads sharp here, almost medicinal for a moment before the other spices settle around it. Within five minutes, the incense arrives and the warmth tilts toward smoke. Not a campfire, something more controlled. Resinous, deliberate, like incense that's been burning in a closed room. The tobacco doesn't announce itself so much as gradually become undeniable, taking over from the incense somewhere around the two-hour mark and staying until the drydown. The gingerbread doesn't disappear, it transforms, becoming part of the smoke rather than separate from it. By hour four, the composition has narrowed to tobacco, tonka, and a quiet trace of hay: warm, dry, intimate. On fabric, a faint ghost of it lingers into the next day. The sillage doesn't project so much as persist, you leave a trail without trying.
Cultural impact
Gretel sits comfortably within Criminal Elements' catalog of oppositional pairings, sweet and smoky, edible and unsettling, the fairy tale you'd tell a child versus the one that actually ends the story. The gingerbread-tobacco combination echoes Tobacco Jam's structural logic but shifts the register entirely, trading jam's brightness for something slower and darker. Among indie houses, the scent holds its own in the warm-spicy space without mimicking the commercial gourmand templates that dominate that category.
