Tulasi Coffee

Meh. It's OK. It's an everyday perfumed charcoal. Casual and unambitious. It has a modestly attractive perfume which burns well. There is some awareness of coffee - not much, but it's there, along with modest dark perfume notes. A little bit of cedarwood, some mineral. It's OK. Pushing back up. 


Date: Jan 2023   Score: 21 

Part of the Tulasi "Exotic" range. I like the idea of a coffee incense - GR International do one, but I wasn't impressed with it.  The blurb on this Tulasi Coffee says it will help "you begin the day with a fresh mind and with energy and vigour". Yep - that's one of the things one associates with coffee, and it would be good to both get a coffee scent and the energising that comes with it. This is, I suppose, one of the theoretical advantages of the modern approach to incense making which involves the use of modern perfuming techniques - or "perfume-dipping" as it's commonly called.  Modern perfume techniques allow for a vast range of scents - there is virtually no limit to what scents can be created or reproduced, including coffee. Masala incense on the other hand depends on natural ingredients, in which the individual scent components are not separated out, but are left in place. Though traditional incense makers have acquired much knowledge over the years, there is a limit to the range of scents possible, especially when some of the ingredients used (such as halmaddi - a binding agent) have their own scents which will be present when the incense is burned, so a coffee aroma is unlikely to be achieved with a masala incense.. But it is largely a theoretical advantage, because these perfume-dipped scents which are created to replicate other scents, all too often don't smell authentic. I think if there were more money in incense (as there is in the perfume industry itself, with big name brands and celebrity scents) then top quality perfumers would work in the incense industry and be able to refine the scents to something much more heavenly, adventurous, or realistic then we tend to get now

Anyway, be that as it may. Let's get on with this coffee incense. There are coffee notes on the stick (along with the usual chemical volatiles and charcoal dust), but these are less apparent when the incense is burned (something I frequently note with perfume-dipped incense, while masala incense tends to smell the same on the stick and when burned). Indeed, there is little smell of anything - something I noted with the GR International Coffee.  There's some of the base charcoal, some vague "burning" smell, chemical notes, and some sort of slightly dark aroma, which could incline toward coffee or chocolate. All in all quite vague and pointless.


Date: Sept 2018  Score: 20

June 2018

I've reached the coffee on my Tulasi re-review weekend. I wasn't impressed with this. It has a burnt aroma. If there's a coffee element, it would be of a very dark roast. It's a dark, sombre, scratchy sort of scent that I didn't get along with. This is, for me, a classic toilet cleaner incense.  Moving the score down.

Date: June 2018  Score: 18

***

More Tulasi reviews