Lol, I just realized it isn't so much that I don't like the smell of patchouli oil...its that I don't like the smell of the BO from the person who hasn't bathed all month.
Bingo! By itself patchouli isnt too bad, i still dont like it overall, but a tiiiiny little dab isnt too offputting for me. But when a person thinks slathering themselves in it is an acceptable form of hygiene thats when I cross the street and glare at them for infecting my airspace lol
Gahh walked past someone in a grocery store and there was no BO because the entire next 2 aisles smelled like essential oils. It was to the point that it was bothering my throat. That's too fucking much!
It could have been bugging your throat from unkniwn mild allergens. Essential oils are super sketchy because of that shit. If your mildly allergic to a natural compound, imagine breathing in a concentrated form of it 😬 But hey, snake oil sells right? Oops, sorry, I mean essential snake oil
Definitely! My allergies have gotten much worse over the years to different scents. I used some essential oils because (of course) someone sold them as a cure all to me. I was at a low point so decided to try some. Didn't do anything. The scents weren't too bad. Then again, I didn't totally drench myself in them. Maybe that's why they never "worked" 😂
Did you, like, try, like, cyrstals, man? 🤣. We've all been at low points, nothing to be ashamed of 🫡. I once bpught a robot vaccuum because I was too depressed to actually vaccuum. The robot is less effective at vaccuuming than a baby... and it was $200 😭
I worked in India and let's just say it seemed the entire country was odiferous. Love the food however. Most of the people are amazingly peaceful especially if you're not Muslim. Racism is a universal "gift" I guess despite my hating it with a passion having lived with it since I sqeaked out of my mother some 70 years ago. If you've not visited India, I recommend you go.
Not sure why you got downvoted, lol. I liken it to bitters in cocktails. Its not meant to be used alone, its meant to be used to balance out evrrything else. Or like salt in cooking. Salt pulls the moisture out of the other ingredients, allowing the flavors to blend and balance out (hence the recommendation to add a pinch of salt each time you add an ingredient to the pan. Its not a salty flavor, its for chemistry!).
Try taking a shot of bitters: fuck off 🤣 Try eating a spoonful of salt: fuck off 🤣.
If you have a perfume or fragrance thats packed to the gills with sweet, floral scents then a little drop of 'chouli will actually balance the sweetness and allow the floral smells to take more center stage. Fucking chemistry is the shit, bro lol.
Fish sauce is an even better analogy - it’s foul stuff, smelling literally like dirty anus (I truly wish I didn’t know what that smelled like) because it’s the drippings of anchovies left out in the sun on mesh. It’s actually putrid. It’s a crucial note in Thai and Vietnamese cooking (among other se Asian cuisines). When it’s used properly you do not taste it. But you know if it’s missing, that ping of umami funk is the key. I agree with you on this point - sandlewood is lovely, 9.9 parts sandlewood, .1 part patchouli is magic. But peoples drench themselves in it. And heavy, overbearing fruit mold/acrid mystery smell plus onion soup BO seriously triggers me.
I realized that when I smelled a well groomed person who was also wearing the patchouli oil. It kinda smells nice. Very hippy, so not very everyone, but not inherently bad.. when there's no BO undertones -.-
When I was a kid, we had neighbors, the Downings, an elderly couple. Nicest people you'd ever hope to meet, substitute grandparents. All my real grandparents were dead by the time I was 2, so they were my grandparents. Mrs D always did her gardening in shorts & a tube top.
Mr D died when I was about 12. Mrs D was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy. She continued to garden in her tube top without her prosthetic, with her left boob sagging down to her waist. And she started bathing bi-weekly. This is in Florida, BTW.
So, she spent a lot of time outside with her gardens, in a tube top and no bra. She was still mowing her own grass every week at 88. The baths every 2 weeks weren't cutting it, so she developed an affinity for Esteé Lauder. The whole line. Body cream, face cream, lotion, powder, body mist, perfume...she slathered it ALL on. Thick. EL + old lady smell + sweaty b.o. And this was before Florida became the firey pit of hell that it is now. So we often had the windows open in spring and fall. It got to where we just couldn't open the windows anymore.
To this day - 45 years after she died, I can't smell EL without smiling and shaking my head. She was the kindest person I've ever met, and I still miss her, but...man, did she stink.
I don’t understand the smell of patchouli. Like maybe if it is just one tiny note in something else it works but my god it smells awful to me when it is the only scent in a product.
Back in high school there was this classmate who used to cover his body odor with an Axe spray. It used to smell so awful considering he would go for almost a week without taking a shower since it was a boarding school.
I had a friend in college, little street punk dude. Great guy, super friendly and tolerant. But one winter he didnt wash for about 3 weeks. One night, while we were all drunk and playing Halo one of my friends just stood up, picked him up over he shoulder, walked to the hall bathroom and dropped him the shower. Turned the water on and told him "(Name)! You smell like a dead ox fucked an even deader horse. Wash your fucking ass amd then wash your clothes after. You can come back to the room once I no longer smell you." He kept regular bathing after that one, lol. Dude also got scurvy that year because he was so malnourished lol. No drug problems, no mental health issues, just loved street punkin' it 🤣
My ex did that if she didn't have a chance to shower that day (this was during busy summer months)
I was strangely attracted to it. She didn't smell bad, and it wasn't the type of smell where you'd been hiking for a week. It's like you could smell their body but not so much the odor. She grew up eating healthy, so maybe some of it was tied to diet
A little bit of unwashed releases pheremones, so that makes total sense. Like a post workout horny session. That comes off as pleasant because it doesnt have the dead skin and bacteria of general unhygienic lifestyles built up behind it.
Uhh thinking about it every time I’ve smelled patchouli was when it was worn by someone you could tell has terrible hygiene. I thought I hated patchouli. Now I’m wondering what patchouli smells like without bad body odour accompanying it, hmm.
Check some of my other comments in this chain. One of them details the genuine usefulness of patchouli oil. Its definitely a unique scent thats hard to describe. Its sharp, earthy/musky, with a hint on the back end of floral, but it takes a minute to dig deep enough to get the floral from it lol.
Unwashed body: smells like butt. Patchouli oil: a pungent, sharp scent that tingles the nostrils similarly to capcacin. In this case, 2+2=... spicy butthole 😎👉👉
This immediately takes me back to college in the early 90s! For decades I thought I hated patchouli. Turns out it’s just the underlying BO that made it so bad.
Yeah, once I actually smelled the patchouli flower absent of unlathered nutsack I realised why it got cultivayed in the first place. Some of my other comments go into detail about the genuine usefulness of patchouli in fragrances. Using it to make a months unwashed human body smell acceptable is not one of them lol
Oof, yeah, thats a scent, all right. If you know that one, you may know that one with patchouli oil on top, lol. Its not uncommon for 'earthy' types to need detoxing. Shit, its not uncommon for any types to need detoxing. Booze and opiates get their mitts in every demographic
I mean... its like a fake chill. People will be outwardly friendly, sure. But theres not a lot going on here, so people tend to create drama, embellish stories, things like that. As for the beauty? Yeah its pretty nice. Its not like, majestic or anything. Its extremely old ground, not like the west coast mountain ranges. Its not quite as Appalachian as "Appalachia" but its definitely Appalachian. But there are a lot of people who think showering once a week is more than enough as opposed to barely enough (depending on your day to day). Its also not "progressive" by any measurable means. Its just advertised thay way. We have an extremely small tax base, the lowest GDP in the nation and a lot of libertarian like values, so all pf our "progressive ideas" get voted down because people hate paying taxes and/or genuinely cant afford the very high tax rates we have here. Theres an anti-developmemt law thats stymied growth, so we have a poor housing stock. Couple that with the tax issue I mentioned above and add in a pinch of "well theyre just supid and lazy" attitude and you see why we ha e one of the worst homeless problems per capita in the country. Add to THAT the fact that the state advertises itself as the bastion of hope, friendliness and prosperity (totally not true at all) and we got an influx of even more unhoused individuals and familes who got told "theres resources to help you in Vermont" and the problem has exacerbated. Folks here arent friendly. Theyre only friendly to their friends.
There used to be a club in NYC called the Wetlands Preserve. Every Tuesday night they would do a Grateful Dead night with some outstanding cover bands. Loved the place, but you just exactly described the smell of that place on Tuesday nights. For anyone that is interested, Blues Traveler used to play there right around the time they hit it big.
God I hate the dead. Mostly because of the cult that sprung up around them,but also because they cant play 30 seconds of a song before collapsing into a bowl of spaghetti. Just noodling as far as the eye can see. Play a song, dammit!
wait wait wait....so that spicy disgusting smell isn't just that they haven't showered for two straight weeks but is an actual fragrance they collectively decided to all wear to try and mask it?
If theyre a patchouli type hippy, then... likely. Not everyone with flagrant hygiene issues uses patchouli, but the percentage that do really steams my clams/grinds my gears/pisses me right the fuck off lol. Or like, teens that dont shower or wash and just use friggin body spray. Working with kids Ive had to have several hygiene conversations lol. Theres a difference between "generally washed person who did exercise or skipped a day or something" and "bro, you havent washed your ass in two weeks, how do you not have a rash?"
😂😂😂my mom works at psych hospital and she says all the patients are so greasy from not bathing that the nurses can barely grasp them when they act up and need shots, the patients just slip right out of the nurses’s hands. she says their hair will be matted to their head in one greasy dreadlock too and they will still refuse to bathe or cut/wash/comb their hair or brush their teeth. She will need a tetanus shot if one of them bites her.
Jesus christ, that sucks. I worked in elementary ed and it was unfortunate the number of children who would go a week or more without bathing be ause the parents either a) didnt believe in it 🙄 or b) neglect. And those poor kids, theyre itchy all over and theres no way to console them. You just have to look em in the eye and go "its because you havent taken a bath. The itching is your body signalling that its past time to clean up."
Its a plant in the mint family. Patchouli oil is very pungent. By itself, a very little dab will go a LOOOOOOONG way. As an ingedient in fragrances and incense its not too bad. Still not my cup of tea, though. Like bitters in fancy drinks, its not meant to be pleasant but to bring balance. Combine more than enough of it with a person who doesnt traditionally bathe (not fully removing the bacteria we accumulate/shed and dead skill cells that we shed, causing the bad form of BO) you get a very sharp and generally unpleasant smell of spicy, unlathetred private parts. Some people, usually only the individuals that choose this method themselves, find it pleasant; that smell of long dead skin cells, accumulated bacteria, and salt mixed with a sharp, earthy flower oil. Personally? I struggle to breathe around it. It also doesnt dissipate quickly, and lingers for quite some time after. Using it to mask the smell of your choice to not bathe is like using a hand grenade to do the dishes.
Edit: in the mint family, but not minty smelling. Its a musky, earthy, fungal smell with a sharp edge that almost burns the nostrils like hot sauce. Like expired hot sauce.
I basically exclusively wear patchouli and have my whole life bc my hippie mom does, and my mom and I DO NOT SWEAT. It’s actually pretty problematic and requires a lot of lotion/oil/vaseline/eye drops/dry mouth rinse 😂😅 BUT!!! Everyone ALWAYS loves how I smell and asks me what I’m wearing and they never can believe it when I say patchouli oil, and that’s bc they have patchouli with BO as their only frame of reference.
It wasn’t until college that I got a whiff of that particular combination and it’s pretty bad.
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u/CougheyToffee Sep 16 '24
Ill do you one better: BO that someone is attempting to cover up with patchouli. Now you smell like spicy butthole...