Spooky Season 2026: Baba Yaga, Poison Apple, and Bring Out Your Dead
Every year I try to make the fall scents earn their names. Anybody can put "pumpkin" on a label in September. What I want is a scent that carries a story you can actually tell somebody in your passenger seat.
So here are three, and here is where each one came from.
Bring Out Your Dead
Clove, cinnamon, rosemary, lemon, and eucalyptus. Sharp, spicy, and bracingly clean, like a cure-all bottled in a dark apothecary.
This is our take on the Thieves blend, and the legend behind it is worth the telling. During the plague years in France, four thieves made a living robbing the homes of the sick and the dead, and somehow never fell ill themselves. When they were finally caught, the magistrate offered them a deal: their secret in exchange for their necks. They confessed to a vinegar steeped in herbs and spices, which they rubbed on their hands, faces, and masks before every job.
Whether it actually protected them is anyone's guess. But the blend outlived the thieves, the plague, and the magistrate, which is more than most of us manage.
Poison Apple
One bite, and the whole orchard goes quiet.
This one opens crisp and tempting: bright red apple and citrus peel dusted with clove and cinnamon, with wild red berries underneath and a fruit-and-floral heart. It is the fairy tale apple, the one that looks better than any apple has a right to look. If you want a fall scent that is not another bakery in a bottle, start here.
Baba Yaga
Deep in the birch woods, past where the path gives out, there is a hut that turns on chicken legs, and inside it the old witch of the forest keeps her fire lit.
Baba Yaga smells like that hut. Palo santo and white sage burning low, smoked sandalwood and fir balsam thick in the air, a cup of black tea cooling on the table. Cashmere musk and tonka bean soften the finish into something warm and strangely comforting.
I will admit the tree nerd in me enjoys this one more than the others. Palo santo (Bursera graveolens) and white sage (Salvia apiana) are both plants people burn for the smell of the smoke rather than the smell of the plant, which is a strange thing when you think about it, and exactly the right note for a witch who may help you or may eat you. You will not know which until you knock.
The practical part
All three are car and small space diffusers, handmade in small batches here in Norman, Oklahoma. They last about five to six weeks depending on heat and airflow, and they work anywhere small and enclosed: a cup holder, a bathroom shelf, a closet, a desk drawer, a locker, a dorm room. The smaller the space, the stronger it reads.
Buy 2, get 1 free applies to the whole diffuser collection, so three singles comes to about $6.67 apiece. Most people take three.
These are limited releases for fall 2026. When they are gone, they are gone, and I am not promising any of them will come back next year.