Patchouli is a very polarizing perfume ingredient, partly due to its associations. Some people really, really hate this smell……
For those coming of age in the sixties and seventies, inexpensive, musky ‘love oil’ patchoulis were of course the smell of unwashed dope-smoking hippies and the headshops in which they congregated – the scent effectively masking the smell of marijuana……a penetrating, dirty-black, vine-like odour that got in the nose hairs and stayed there. Perfume forums discussing any patchouli scent even now usually state whether it is ‘headshop’ or not, as if this were the worst crime in perfumanity, as though the Summer Of Love were something to be quite ashamed of……..you hairy, filthy hippy.
For Eighties kids like me, growing up near Birmingham with my excited Saturday visits to the Oasis underground…
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The Black Narcissus 