You Do Like Patchouli

Newsletter #19: a zealot of the funk

When I go sniffing in the wild I have a tendency to accumulate stray blotters in whatever bag I have with me. I always feel a bit sad when I see discarded blotters scattered among the bottles in a department store, their sprayers not bothering to hang around ‘till the drydown.

The alternative, of course, is that my bags and rooms and pockets are filled with little slips of fragrant detritus whose ghostly sillage can linger for days and weeks if left unattended.

There’s one such haunting happening in my bedroom right now, a ghoulish patchouli of truly monumental proportions. I don’t know where it’s coming from or what blotter I’ve stashed that is causing it, but for about two weeks now every so often I will be sitting at my vanity or reading in bed when I smell it: that damn patchouli.

‘That damn patchouli,’ I’ll mutter, and then go back to whatever I was doing.

There’s a touch of the Telltale Heart about it, but as far as hauntings go this one is pretty benign. Benign but persistent, which I think is good overall description for patchouli and its place in modern perfumery.

All of this is to say that I’ve had patchouli on the mind this week. I think about it in that liminal time between lying down to rest and actually falling asleep when your brain has no distractions and all the things you don’t want to think about come rushing in.

Patchouli’s a funny thing because everyone thinks they have an opinion on it and if they say they don’t like it they’re probably wrong. The fact is, to enjoy modern perfumery at all means de facto you like patchouli. The material is so ubiquitous that even those who huff and revive Richard Nixon for a brief moment as they mutter ‘damn hippie smell’ are probably wearing a perfume that’s built on a patchouli facet as they say it.

Patchouli is one of the great natural perfumes, like rose and vetiver, because as a material it contains multitudes. It smells earthy and grassy and verdant, but also damp and moldy and dust-filled. There are elements of patchouli that smell like rich chocolate cake and there are elements that smell like dark-timbered floors. Perfumers can draw on these parts, together or separately, to enhance or contrast other, flashier parts of a perfume. The patchouli will ground everything and keep it cohesive.

That’s why patchouli shows up in amber accords, and chypres, and ouds, and woody-ambers, and gourmands. The newest Givaudan menace prowling the streets is a captive aromachemical called Akigalawood that is derived from patchouli oil. This stuff is everywhere - it’s the microplastics of perfume.

This is the revenge of the hippie: patchouli is everywhere and you love it, even if don’t like it that much.

I think a lot about the criterion of embarrassment in perfumery. This is a theory in biblical scholarship that uncomfortable or embarrassing elements of a story lend it more credence. The way it works in theology is that the Bible is a body of work that people have been editing for two thousand years, cutting out the parts that didn’t match the cultural mood of their own times, and the things that we’re left with all sit somewhere on the scale between probably original text and definitely made up by a judgey monk in the 12th century.

The lesson that this all gives us is that to humans, if something is made of entirely pleasant components it doesn't feel genuine. We don’t trust it. There’s got to be a bit of ugliness, something that brushes up against the parts of life that are difficult and uncertain, for it to resonate. There is something primal about this and that’s why it is twice as true for scent, the most primal of the senses.

And to me that’s why patchouli is such an important part of perfumery, because it can smell like chocolate cake and it can also smell like dirt. If you gave a human a perfume organ and a thousand years they would probably never land on an accord that smells quite like patchouli does. Undiluted patchouli oil with its intensely musky earthiness evokes such a visceral reaction, be it love or hate, because it is all the beauty and all terror of nature in one little bottle.

The other great thing about patchouli is that it lasts forever. There’s a reason it was used as an insect repellent hundreds of years ago and as the scent of choice for paranoid stoners in more recent times. There’s a reason it’s haunting my bedroom right now. When all the other smells fade, when your perfume has flared through its heart and down to embers of its drydown, patchouli will still be there.

At the end of the world the last thing lingering on our clothes will be patchouli and ashes.

So when I’m lying there, thinking about all the million ways that patchouli has become the load bearing wall of perfumery, I play the game I’m always playing with any given theme in the fragrance world: okay, but what’s the best patchouli?

What’s the biggest, dirtiest, mustiest, chocolate cake-ist patchouli there is? What’s the extreme that this scent can be taken to whilst still being wearable, still olfactory art? Is there even really point in trying to make a patchouli soliflore when people can and do just buy patchouli oil and wear that as a scent on its own?

What perfume can I reach for if all I want is a Big Patchouli?

There’s a lot of contenders in this category, from designer to niche to indie/artisan. We’ve spoken about Coromandel and Borneo 1834 before, and they’re undeniably masterpieces but too polished for me, too put together - I don’t want a patchouli in pearls. There’s Monsieur (Frederic Malle) and Tempo (Diptyque), Psychedelique (Jovoy) and Patchouly (Profumum Roma)…. I’m a real patchouli freak and I love all of these perfumes. But as I was lying there one night with that strange half-life sillage lingering I thought,

‘The best Big Patchouli is still Reminiscence.’

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Baby Boomers, the Western generation born between 1945 - 1965, get a lot of postmodern blame for ruining the world. And maybe they did. But there was a time when they, too, were young, and there were generations older than them that they blamed for ruining the world, and in that rebellion the counterculture of the 1960’s was born. And the scent of the counterculture was patchouli.

Take one whiff of patchouli and you can smell the appeal. Not only does it have threads of the wider Eastern cultural appropriation that the hippie movement was built on but raw patchouli oil is also about the furthest thing from the buttoned-up, prim, aldehyde-and-hedione scents of the 40’s and 50’s. It would have felt like the biggest fuck you possible to wear the biggest scent imaginable, the olfactory dimension to pair with the long hair and the long necklaces.

Patchouli is a scent that demands attention, reaction - it is unignorable.

Thus Patchouli (Reminiscence, 1970) must be understood in the context from which it was born. Reminiscence is one of those simplistic, straightforward French brands that are dotted through Provence and the Côte d'Azur that mostly sell soliflores in simple bottles at affordable prices. The brand opened in 1970 and debuted three scents, but it is Patchouli that they’re mainly known for.

This because the scent is perhaps the reference patchouli, the one that you can smell in the Coromandels and Tempos, and you can buy it for practically nothing from an online retailer or a chemist.

The same part of me that loves the kind of ugly, clinical skincare you can buy in huge tubs is the part that loves the dirt cheap perfumes they’ve been selling at the chemist for $20 for the past forty years. Jovan Musk, Tabu, Brut, Pino Silvestre, Tea Rose. As the niche market nudges the price for all perfumes higher and higher and the generation that faithfully bought bottles of these perfumes every year leaves us, I worry for these workhorses of the perfume world. They’re cheap not because they’re poor quality but because their formulas are simple, brilliant, and honest.

Reminiscence’s Patchouli is one of these perfumes. Its simple bottle, crooked label, and reassuringly dirt-coloured juice is as comforting to me as a La Roche-Posay sunscreen. This is a scent so keen to jump out of the bottle and linger on your clothing that just taking the lid off slaps you in the face with that delicious dirt smell, like damp soil, like the smell in your oven after you’ve roasted beetroot.

Unless you’re a true zealot of the funk like I am, I’m not going to lie: the first ten minutes of this perfume will be unpleasant for you. If you’re not someone who likes the smell of wet stone, mothballs, and old attics, you should spray Patchouli and then gracefully walk into another room. But you will be missing out on something spectacular, a deliciously distressing scent that you have no trouble believing would linger in that spooky mist that always curls through cemeteries and old warehouses in Scooby Doo cartoons.

Maybe the best thing about patchouli - and indeed about Patchouli - is that it has so much body. There’s a dense fleshiness to the scent that is so human in a strange and appealing way - it’s sweaty, yes, but more than that it’s sensual, warm and almost alive like the hot skin underneath the sweat as well.

A hot, sweaty villain in a mid-century cemetery - that’s the first ten minutes of Patchouli. You’re either a person who’s going to love that or you are not.

Things calm down a bit after that. I would call the basic structure of Patchouli an amber. After the initial musty blast of patchouli simmers down, it turns into a lovely, warm, radiant thing. The dense body of the patchouli is not lightened by anything but the scent’s concentration (it is, wisely, an eau de toilette) but instead is melded with musk and resins and a nice big slug of coumarin.

Looking back in time and trying to call Patchouli a gourmand is like trying to call the suffragettes feminist: all the pieces are there but it feels like something doesn’t quite fit. But in the same vein it’s a modern fallacy to think that the structural concept behind a gourmand is anything new - perfumes that smell like dessert are as old as Guerlain, it’s the overdose of ethyl maltol that’s new.

And you can smell a forebearer of Angel in Patchouli, a warm vanillic creaminess that draws out the cocoa-like facets of the patchouli. Once all the mustiness has faded away what you’re left with is something dense and resinous and full bodied, like a slice of chocolate cake with creme diplomat that you can only bear for a few bites. But god those bites are good. Vintage ‘dessert’ scents smelled like this, rich and creamy without that blood sugar spike of a modern gourmand.

A great soliflore will magnify its central note and bring in complementary scents to enhance all of its facets, and this is the real magic of Patchouli. It is so many things, and yet it is also just Patchouli. And you will never, ever, ever get the scent out of your clothes. Attention and reaction.

Every generation of humanity always feels like the world is falling down around them, and they always feel like this is new. Reminiscence released Patchouli in 1970, a year that saw civil unrest, multiple wars, deadly cyclones and floods, and widespread inflation. History rhymes; the uncertainty happens over and over again; it’s only the context that changes.

When I smell that ghostly blotter in my room, and when I smell Patchouli, I feel a moment of olfactory solidarity of the counterculture then: a sliver of connection to those young people who lived in turbulent times were called radical for choosing to chase freedom and joy.

Versions of patchouli are everywhere, so maybe it’s time for a true patchouli renaissance. Zealots of the funk, rise up. ▣