Incense in The Wind: Aargee Jasmine tube series (discontinued)

Second review - scroll down for earlier

Smoky, intrusive, and clearly chemical based. Bordering on unpleasant and offensive, but just stops short. Cheap and almost nasty. How my experience of incense has changed in two and half years!

Date: Dec 2015 Score: 20

First review

A 20g tube of jasmine incense, made in India for Aargee Novelties, a British company founded in 1978 to import incense and ethnic gifts. Bought for 45p from the excellent value online shop Asian Cookshop. The sticks are smooth and glossy, and give the appearance of being machine dipped. They are black, with some black powder coming off on the fingers, but not much. The sticks are undyed. They produce a decent amount of smoke which is soft and warm and very pleasant. The sticks are pleasantly flowery, slightly sweet, with something of the heady perfume of jasmine. The aroma when burning is very attractive - it is a clean smell, with crisp, bright citric notes playing around the base sandalwood and the middle bergamont and jasmine. It is both relaxing and cleansing.

Arabian jasmine is the main jasmine flower of India - it is native to India, and has been used for hundreds of years as personal ornamentation, for flavouring tea or food, and as a fragrance. It is one of the oldest fragrance flowers cultivated by mankind. It has associations as an aphrodisiac, and is also regarded as an anti-depressant and sedative, and as an antiseptic or cleansing property.

Date: April 2013 Score: 30

Note: The British importer Aargee commissions a number of Indian incense makers to make incense for them under a variety of brand names and styles. The Argee tube series, which are of basic scents - machine dipped, very heady and flowery, packaged in retro tubes with colourful, old fashioned wrappings, are by Mysore Sugandhi.

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