AtlasEarthy
Patchouli
Pogostemon cablin (Blanco) Benth.
The atlas door to patchouli: the oil and its cuts, the extracts, and patchoulol.
- Place in the wear
- Base
- What remains. Woods, resins, roots, musks.
- Office
- Fixative
- Holds the span so the opening does not leave alone.
- Family
- Earthy
- Type
- Essential oil
- Origin
- Indonesia, India and China
- Span
- Very long. Earth and camphor first, then a dry, cocoa-dark wood.
- Odor
- Wet earth, camphor, dark wood, cocoa, a sweet must
- Also called
- Patchouly, Pogostemon
- Botanical family
- Lamiaceae
- Plant part
- Dried leaf
Patchouli is a bushy mint whose leaves are dried and lightly fermented before distillation. Fresh oil is harsh and camphoraceous; it softens with age into a dark, sweet earth with cocoa and wine in it. Few bases hold together without it in a chypre or a modern amber.
Patchoulol carries the woody body, and norpatchoulenol, a trace constituent, gives much of the true patchouli smell. Perfumers buy the oil in several forms: dark iron-distilled oil, light steel-distilled oil, a heart fraction with the camphor and earth stripped back, and solvent and CO2 extracts.
This page is the atlas door to patchouli. The entries listed beside it go deeper: the dark and light oils, the heart fraction, the CO2 extract and the absolute, and patchoulol, norpatchoulenol and the patchoulenes.
Sources
- Fairamour editorial (original)
- GBIF: Pogostemon cablin (Blanco) Benth.