The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Palo Santo & Patchouli Vert began as a single childhood memory: the grandmother's room. Founder Mariela Schwarz Montiel grew up in spaces filled with Palo Santo furniture, and her grandmother, Carlotha Despierre de Schwarz, the namesake of the house, kept green patchouli leaves slipped into the closets, pressed between folded linens like aromatic secrets. Perfumer Jean-Michel Duriez translated that intimacy into a fragrance, fusing the smell of furniture made from sacred wood with the green, almost medicinal quality of patchouli leaves. It is a room you are not meant to enter, only remember.
What makes this composition unusual is the way it refuses the obvious path. Palo Santo is a material often associated with incense and ceremony, but Duriez chose a different register: the wood of furniture, of dressers and closets, of objects that hold memory rather than burn with it. The guava leaf note is the connective tissue, tropical, slightly bitter, green in a way that bridges the fruity opening and the woody base. Osmanthus adds a quiet floral sweetness that doesn't announce itself, and the leather in the drydown keeps everything grounded without tipping into heaviness.
The evolution
The opening hits bright, pear and raspberry softened by davana's wine-like quality, a saffron warmth underneath that hints at what's coming. Within twenty minutes, the fruit begins to recede and the guava leaf emerges, greener than expected, almost vegetable. The jasmine appears here, quiet and tubular, preventing the heart from becoming too heavy. By the second hour, the Palo Santo and cedar arrive together, the patchouli settling into the base like dust on old wood. The leather surfaces last, warm and intimate, close enough to be mistaken for skin. By evening, only the cedar and oakmoss remain, the smell of a room after everyone has left.
Cultural impact
Palo Santo holds sacred significance in Andean traditions, where it has been burned for spiritual cleansing and healing rituals for centuries. Patchouli's association with the 1960s counterculture movement created a lasting cultural resonance, symbolizing authenticity and free-spirit expression. The combination of these two culturally loaded materials in a 2023 release represents a dialogue between indigenous ritual and Western counterculture nostalgia. Carlotha Ray's framing of this scent around a grandmother's room adds a third cultural layer: domestic memory and the way scent preserves intergenerational experience.
