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| Photo by Hypnotica Studios Infinite |
Patchouli is commonly associated with hippies, and for good reason: its potent aroma is ideal for camouflaging body odors, sex smells, and marijuana vapors. This made it pretty handy in the years between 1963 and 1975. In 2023 it is still kindred to its free-love roots, but now belongs to a sort of postmodernistically open interpretation of human experience, where its facets can be tweaked and comported to fit an individualistic fracturing of society. Think Urs Fischer, not Yayoi Kusama. Enter Eldritch.
"Eldritch" is an adjective for "weird and sinister or ghostly." As a fragrance, it is definitely weird; those unwashed naked bodies on Hawaiian beaches in black-and-white photos are now thrown into a digitally color-corrected American inner city, given pink hair, and plopped amidst a field of NPCs on their smart phones. Eldritch adopts a viciously aggressive profile, throwing the crispness of a properly dusky oolong tea, a leathery opoponax, a super-dry oakmoss, and a camphor-heavy patchouli into a designer woody-amber that smells intentionally 2020s ("THIS IS A CHALLENGING PERFUME") and serious.
There are things I like and don't like about Eldritch. I like its conifer top accord. I also like its base of artfully minty aromatics, all moored to a woody dock. And I enjoy how the camphor-like aspects of the patchouli wed themselves to the mineralic elements of smoky tea to create a biting, marine-like ambergris effect. I find it unbearable as an extrait, but it would open up in an EDT concentration and allow itself (and its wearer) to breathe.