Incense In The Wind

Burner Burner - Carhartt jacket incense burner

Thursday 16 May 2024

HEM Lemon

 


A single scent synthetic-perfume incense stick from HEM. I've only had two previous lemon scented incense sticks - BIC Lemon, and Emporium Mystic Scents Lemon.   Curiously those two were very similar to this HEM Lemon in many ways - not just the scent, but the appearance and quality. These are clearly low cost sticks using poor quality charcoal powder and thin hand-cut bamboo splints.  The Emporium company, now closed, were a cheap and nasty incense house. Based in Rochdale, they sourced sticks from Vietnam and India. BIC are a better quality incense house - they make Panchavati dhoop, a successful and best selling dhoop, as well as a mix of decent masala and perfumed incense. HEM are, of course, one of the world's best selling and most successful incense houses. They concentrate on low cost but well made room-freshener incense, though have moved recently into making masala incense which has been rather good.  It's curious that three different companies end up selling pretty much the same incense stick....

The scent on the stick is clearly chemical and synthetic, and smells like lemon-scented floor cleaner. The scent on the burn is very poor because lemon is a fragrance top note - light and delicate, it doesn't take much to burn it off quickly. If anyone wanted to have a lemon scent in the house, putting a few drops of lemon essential oil into an oil warmer would be way better than burning incense sticks.  To be fair, the scent is not offensive, and some lemon does survive, but it's pretty ineffectual. I wonder why they even bother. 


Date: May 2024   Score: 18
***




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