Opuhi

I was busy for quite a while when I wanted to know what opuhi means. At first I found different plants, but the most reliable information tells me that opuhi, also known as shampoo ginger or pinecone ginger (the reason for this name is obvious when you see the picture above), is Zingiber zerumbet, a deciduous ginger that multiplies rapidly and blooms every year. The name shampoo ginger is less obvious, but apparently the mature flower cone contains a large amount of aromatic slimy juice that is used as shampoo or conditioner for the hair, but also as a body wash and even for massage. It makes the hair soft and shiny and can be rinsed out or left in. Other parts of the plant are also used. The leaves and stalks are used in cooking and the rhizomes have a medical use. The flower stalks sprout from the ground and grow below the leave stalks.

Flowers grow from the cones a few at a time:

The last picture comes from this source that gave me a lot of information. Wikipedia also provided some interesting facts. This ginger plant apparently originated in India, was distributed eastward through Polynesia and introduced to the Hawaïan Islands in the canoes of early Polynesian settlers. For this reason the plant has many names. Opuhi is the Polynesian name, as the scent that brought me on this search is from the Flotsam series (a limited edition in 2008) of the Atomic Luau Lounge of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. 

Sometimes the reason to choose a certain scent is rather mundane. I chose Opuhi today because someone is selling a bottle of it and it is on my list of scents I want more of. But because I have only a few drops of it, I had not been wearing it for a long time. The lab's description is short:

Ginger blossom and vanilla orchid

At first I wondered why I wanted more of it. I smelled ginger and vanilla, not very special. But it needed some time to settle into a very warm, creamy scent that is more than ginger and vanilla.