The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Vampire Heart arrived in 2025 from Kevin Schepis, a Brazilian independent house whose first major release, Vampire Blood, leaned on passion flower, pomegranate, gardenia, jasmine, vanilla, and vetiver for a floral-fruited profile. Heart pulls away from that territory and moves inward, a quieter sort of gothic. The title suggests not the wound but the organ behind it, which means the composition can't reach for fangs. It has to reach for ache. The story here is tenderness with teeth retracted, the beating thing that still won't stop after the rest of the body gives up. That tension is the brief. Everything in the bottle is in service of it, from the opening's bruised-fruit sweetness to the resin-and-wood close that holds the room without raising its voice.
Heart skips oud or tobacco and turns instead to myrrh, building its dark register around that resin and the Bulgarian rose that anchors the heart. Pairing rose with myrrh gives the composition a weight that feels almost devotional, a hush rather than a statement. Sandalwood adds a creamy drydown that keeps the darkness wearable rather than funereal, while Hedione brings a dewy, almost skin-like transparency to the heart that lifts the whole arrangement off the skin.
The evolution
The first fifteen minutes announce themselves with blackcurrant and bergamot, and the ylang-ylang underneath keeps it from reading as a simple fruit opening. That tropical-floral whisper threads through the entire drydown, which is unusual for a composition this dark, and it's what stops the opening from being a cold pour of juice. The blackcurrant hits with a dark, almost cordial intensity, and the bergamot cuts in with a citrus brightness that keeps the fruit from collapsing into jam. Within thirty minutes the Bulgarian rose and heliotrope have staged their quiet takeover. The rose here is cooler, more translucent, with a faint almond bitterness from the heliotrope sitting beside it, and that heliotrope-rose conversation gives the heart its particular tension, a powdery note leaning into a floral one until neither is fully itself.
Cultural impact
Within the Kevin Schepis catalog, Vampire Heart has found a particular readership: people drawn to dark florals but uninterested in leaning all the way into blood and smoke. The composition offers a more wearable register than much of the house's other work, the same gothic sensibility routed through Bulgarian rose, myrrh, and sandalwood rather than through heavier resins or smoke accords. For someone who wants atmosphere without costume, it reads as an accessible entry point, a dark floral that earns its shadows through restraint rather than volume.
