Patchouli

Patchouli is a bushy aromatic herb of the mint family, Pogostemon cablin, native to tropical Asia, whose leaves yield a dark, heavy, earthy essential oil that grows richer with age. Its scent reached the West in a memorable way: the fine woven shawls of Kashmir and India were packed with dried patchouli leaves to protect them from moths on the long voyage, and the smell became so bound up with the genuine article that European makers of imitation shawls had to scent theirs with patchouli to sell them. The plant's practical use as an insect-repellent is its oldest and plainest virtue.

Patchouli remains a major ingredient of modern perfumery, valued by perfumers precisely for the same heavy, long-lasting base note that once protected Kashmiri shawls, and it appears in a large share of the world's fine fragrances, from nineteenth-century classics to contemporary releases, as a fixative that helps lighter floral and citrus notes last longer on the skin, a technical role in the perfumer's craft quite distinct from its later countercultural reputation. Indonesia now supplies the great majority of the world's patchouli oil, grown and distilled chiefly on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi, an agricultural industry that has shifted the plant's commercial centre of gravity from South Asia to Southeast Asia over the past century.

In the modern language of scent and of occult correspondence patchouli is a warm, earthy, grounding fragrance associated with the material and the sensual, used in incense and oils for prosperity, fertility and physical love, and read as a scent of the body and the earth rather than of the airy or celestial. In the twentieth century it became strongly identified with the counterculture of the 1960s and after, worn as a badge of an unconventional and earthy way of life. Its meanings, earthy sensuality and grounding, follow directly from the deep, soil-like heaviness of the scent itself, a fragrance unlike the sweetness of flowers and closer to the ground.

Modern laboratory research has given real support to patchouli's oldest and plainest use: the plant's essential oil has been shown to have genuine insect-repellent and antifungal properties, lending real chemical substance to the centuries-old practice of packing dried patchouli leaves with textiles to protect them from moths, one of the few pieces of patchouli lore that turns out to rest on measurable chemistry rather than only on a distinctive smell people learned to associate with protection. The same oil is studied today, still inconclusively, for possible anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial effects on skin, an active area of research rather than any settled medical finding.