Incensum Benzoin

 

This is a very pleasant masala incense made in "The Incensum Village", South India. There is a website, www.incensum.in, which in Oct 2022 was not working - however, it has existed on the internet since at least 2007, and there are glimpses of it available on WayBack. Incensum Incense appears to have been founded in 2000 as "Project Incensum" - an independent research project which became "a collective effort of many incense traders, retailers, fragrance professionals and scores of incense lovers from many countries", and then produced its own incense in Coimbatore, South India, with its own group of workers, shown here.  I am unsure if it still exists, and I can't recall where I got this packet of incense from.  There is an incense company, Vittal Lalitham Aashirvaad, who occupy the same premises in Coimbatore, but it's unclear what relationship, if any, there is between the two. 

There is a very pleasant scent on the stick which appears to be oil/perfume based, and is sweet, woody, musky, sexual, very attractive. This is a charcoal based masala, coated with a woody melnoorva to prevent the finished products from sticking together. Melnoorva is usually made from a mixture of charcoal powder and jigat (also called joss powder, jiggat, jiggit) which is fine powdered tree bark. 

The scent on the burn is woody and natural. It burns evenly and slowly, and gently informs the room with its clean, woody scent. This is a decent quality incense - solid, traditional, and without frills. It's calming and reassuring and comforting, with a refined and gentle sense of cleansing. It gives a long burn which leaves a gentle and pleasing aroma.  Decent stuff. 

Incensum have some curious opinions on halmaddi, the tree resin popular in the West as an incense ingredient. They feel that moist incenses are due to the presence of halmaddi (this has not been my experience - my own experience is that flora/fluxo incenses tend to be the ones that are moist, and that is due to heavy use of fragrant oils  - essential or "agarbatti oil" (which is usually diethyl phthalate) rather than the use of halmaddi, and that most incenses I have had which have prominently used halmaddi, have been dry).  They also feel that moist incense attracts mould. Mould on incense is uncommon, but can occur, and is more due to storage than the possibility that an ingredient is attracting moisture. Dry organic ingredients, such as are present in masala, Tibetan, and Japanese incense, can become mouldy if poorly packed and/or allowed to come into contact with moisture, and then left. A wet masala such as a fluxo which contains a fair degree of essential oils (with or without halmaddi) is less likely to become mouldy as the oil would protect the ingredients. Mould is more likely to occur on poorly packed Tibetan incense.  Their final comment is one I do agree with, that incense with halmaddi can become "corrupted" by the halmaddi, so that the halmaddi aroma dominates. Indeed, from my research, the use of halmaddi as a plasticiser to strengthen and prolong the scent decreased over time because of problems with aroma dominance, and that it was replaced with DEP, which has a volatility but does not have a scent. However, use of halmaddi as a fragrant ingredient is increasing because of its popularity in the West. 

Date: Oct 2022    Score: 32 

***

 What's The Best Incense In The World?

Benzoin / Loban / Sambrani