Sarah posted a thread earlier (in chate) from another message board. In it, a young lady was complaining that her boss had taken her aside and told her that she smells foul. She admits that she has a "natural body smell", I imagine because she does not shower everyday. She also eschews deoderant and all scents except for patchouli.
Now, how the hell did patchouli become the official scent of these people? It's frankly a poor choice - it smells bad and it's strong, and does not mingle well with the scent of body odor, unwashed clothes and stale weed smoke. Yet somehow, it's an olfactory icon of the hippie subculture. Does anyone know why?
Disclaimer: My parents were original recipe hippies, as in they actually were part of the group of young people that moved from the Midwest to California in the late 60s / early 70s to listen to music, live 20 to a house, do drugs and live off welfare while raging against The Man. Whether the patchouli thing was common then or a product of the various neo-hippies that have come after, I don't know. I could ask them but their memories about those days aren't so clear due to: they were hippies.