Nandita Floral Valley

Second review - scroll down for earlier

Sweet, attractive, fruity, floral soap scent on the stick. Quite appealing albeit a little simplistic and commercial. Some softly musky/patchouli notes underneath gives it a solid and sexy base, and some balance against the rather too frivolous top notes. It's a vibrant and compelling accord. 

A good, steady burn. Very likeable and warm. More resinous than I expected, with subtle frankincense notes. I'm not finding the scent on the burn to be the same as the scent on the stick, as I did in 2022. But I am enjoying the scent rather more than I was expecting from my experiences with  recent Nandita machine-extruded sticks. But this is a traditional hand-rolled masala stick. This is proper old-school Nandita - the Nandita I fell in love with back in May 2013 when I first encountered Nandita Wood Spice. It's like there are two Nandita production lines - the old school line, which is still making hand-rolled traditional masala incense, and the modern line, which is making machine-extruded perfumed-masala. I like the old school hand-rolled line, and I hope that Nandita will keep that going. At least until they can sort out how to make machine-extruded incense which smells as good as the hand-rolled. I suspect it is to do with the formulation, and perhaps in the machine-extruded they are relying too heavily on external oils, rather than folding the fragrance into the paste, as they appear to do with the hand-rolled sticks. 

For a while I had lost the floral notes in the burn. I moved the incense stick to several different rooms before I found it again - a pink carnation smell. I only looked for it because I had noted it there previously. I found it - zing! - on the stick. But my nose was not picking it up on the burn. My nose had latched onto the woody, resinous, frankincense type scent on the burn, and wasn't letting go. The relationship between ourselves and scent is curious.  

Date: Feb 2025   Score: 39 

First review

A dreamy, sweet, flowery incense. I loved this straight from opening the pack (well, before that even, as the dreamy aroma was winking at me before I opened the pack!). It's a musky, woody, sweet, flowery scent. Lots of bright energy and joy. It makes itself felt, but softly, softly, softly and beautifully. Touches of vanilla. Oh yes. Glorious. This is really my sort of incense. Generous but gentle. Sweet, rich, deep, musky, flowery and woody. There's pretty much most things I like, and little that I don't like.

It's a mildly moist fragrant charcoal paste hand-rolled on a plain bamboo splint, and finished with a thin coating of wood powder. It appears that there are pure essential oils in this - I'm not detecting any solvents - no sharp notes on the stick. It smells as sweet and oily as my essential oils. And what I really like is that it smells the same on the burn as it does on the stick, which doesn't happen that often. Mostly I find the sticks smell great, but the burn reveals flaws, or simply doesn't live up to the promise of the stick. But this stick is honest. What you smell is what you get. I'm assuming that if you use quality ingredients and don't dilute them with "agarbatti oil" or some other impurities, that this is the sort of incense you will get. I don't think the trick to making good incense is that hard. It's making a decent income in the face of intense competition and not giving in to the temptation to decrease the quality ingredients that is hard.

Available in the UK from ScentedAndMore: £1.50 for 15g; in India from Chakrayog for 100R; in the US from ExoticIncense for $2.00; and in Australia from SunDrops for $2.95. 

Date: Dec 2022 Score: 43

***

Nandita Fragrances of Mumbai