Patchouli 24 (2006)
by Le Labo

This is amazing. Come on! This is patchouli. A light patchouli but stop with that nonsense that what's in the name is not in the juice. And the drydown is not vanilla. It is vanilline. The cheap white powder that is used as a substitute of the expensive real thing. I always prefer the real thing when I cook but I must admit that the use of vanilline in a fragrance is ingenious. It brings the soft roundness of vanilla, without the sweetness and with a strong peppery burn in the nostrils. How come no-one thought of this before? Big thumbs up for the idea (by the way, vanilline is a by-product of paper manufacturing).

Birch tar & leather opening vaguely remiscent of Lonestar Memories, then settles down into the most umm…unique barbecue & bubblegum(Dubble Bubble, precisely) accord. I’ve never smelled anything quite like it and it lasts forever. It’s oddly compelling though not in a pleasant way. I would never want to smell of it.

I absolutely love the complexity of this fragrance, the smoky rubbery tar opening that evolves into a hazy vanilla veil at the very tail end. It is everything I could not appreciate years ago when I first began my fragrance collecting, and now I can fully appreciate the complex structure, the slinky skin salt note that wraps through the whole delicious mix. Totally amazing and worth every minute.

One of the best in LeLabo line. The scent itself isn't based on patchouli like the name stated at all.
The concept is the same as Bvlgari Black but it is so much better.
First on the skin, I smell smoky birch tar with a slightest hint of patchouli.
Later the scent creates a very good balance between tar and the sweetness of vanilla, whereas in BLV Black it dries down to a vanilla base with slight hint of burned tea and rubber left.

Salty and smokey leather patchouli buring in a fireplace alongside some vanilla and animalic qualities. Too bizarre though.

Patchouli 24 is in a personal category of fragrances I like to call a "niche mess" and more often than not, I'm head over heals for everything I put into this category. Patchouli 24 is no exception. I can divide my Patchouli 24 experience into two very distinct parts. In the opening I'm treated to that "whoah, slow down there fella!" thing where all the notes come at me in a brawl of sensations and textures. There's heaps of smoke, tar, the smell of old dry things like leather or jerky, and vanilla to ground and soften what COULD be a very ugly experience. On the contrary, this is absolutely fantastic and that very vanilla seems to bind and lubricate everything dry and severe about this fragrance, so that when all is said and done, I actually consider Patchouli 24 to be one of my number one comfort scents, and instead of dry, I sense it as being very rich, if one could imagine thick vanilla tar in a molten, liquid form.

The second part of my experience with Patchouli 24 is the cozy part for me. Not long after I apply it, everything starts to chill out and I envision a log cabin in the woods. If I might elaborate, this really does paint a pretty specific image in my mind... the air outside is pointedly cold and crisp, the sky radiantly blue, the scent of fireplace hangs in the air all around, and you take a whiff of your clean, slightly fabric softened (not the fresh smelling kind, the snuggly soft kind) flannel shirt, and you just wanna curl up in a thick quilt blanket on a big, old, worn leather arm chair and soak it all in. The end of Patchouli 24 smells like that to me. There's something unmistakably gentle and soft in this fragrance that really makes this shift in sensations a brilliant achievement. Love...it! Love it!