YOU WANT PATCHOULI? I’LL GIVE YOU PATCHOULI……. PATCHOULI, by SPECIES BY THE THOUSANDS (2023)

I used to be paranoid about patchouli.

In Japan, I erroneously assumed that there had to be something repellent about this most husky of essences, earthy and bodily, like crumbs of old food stuck firmly in a smoker’s unkempt beard ; soil-like and buried; pernicious…insidious.

I realized, then – especially in recent times – , that natural patchouli essence is in fact everywhere. When you pass by the ‘daily incense’ section in the supermarket, stacked next to chemical cleansers and laundry detergent, the unmistakeable powdery combination of patchouli, benzoin and camphor rises up even from the cheapest blends like ghosts from the past and the present; penetrating but soothing , allusive, mysterious.

Intense, vivid and lingering patchouli oil as a perfume, or as part of aroma therapeutic spray mists and other lotions , is also a currently ubiquitous part of the Japanese urban scentscape. What I find to be a fearfully divisive perfume ingredient (patchouli-haters are among the most vociferously oppositional note-phobes in the fragrance community) clearly isn’t here in the J- city; with its inherent naturalness, deep-grounding earthiness and somewhat nerve-blunting anti-stress properties, patchouli, in its full resplendent state – not bastardized and castrated in its duty free sweet caramel popular form – despite its fuzzier, hippier connotations, often seems to denote a certain clarity.

Probably the reason why the shelf stock of this natural oil roll on (a 10% Javan patchouli in jojoba oil blend ) is fast dwindling at the only niche perfume shop I visited today in a department store in Fujisawa. It is basically everything you could want in a patchouli – the intuitively selected dilution prevents it from becoming too hoary or filth-hairy; it has the right balance of earth and sweet dryness; you can use it quite easily to bolster other perfumes ( I am fancying it in tandem with vintage Gentleman de Givenchy or the castoreum mimosa rose patchouli of the Paloma Picasso edp at an upcoming Halloween party on Sunday evening ). Personally, I find sometimes, that patchouli can grate on one’s inner aesthetics when the mood isn’t right – it can feel intrusive and neverending; rough; sick and scratchy; but when you are in the perfect state of mind to just bury yourself deeper underground, to escape everything, be at one with all its leaves and the musty foraging forest roots, a pleasingly complex but simple scent such as this one, just a little glided onto the skin, is undoubtedly the natural way to go.