A two stick sample sent to me by Irene of German incense blog Rauchfahne. The Natural Incense Company was founded in 2011 in a village just outside Mandya, in Old Mysore, Southern India. They produce traditional masala incense for private label companies. These sticks were made for the Italian organic products importer, Fiore d'Oriente in their Marco Polo's Treasures range.
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The stick is based around Cinnamomum camphora, also known as Camphora_officinarum, and commonly as the camphor tree, from which we get the fragrant substance camphor, which has many uses, including as a perfume or incense ingredient.
Ooh, quite minty and camphory on the stick. It's a bit like Vicks VapoRub. It's interesting and likeable, but not hugely. I suppose it depends on how much you get pleasure from smelling Vicks. I like it, but in small doses, and it's not really something I want by itself in an incense. Blend it with something else, yeah; but on its own - mmm, probably not.
The burn is not attractive. It's quite dry and prickly. There are burning notes which once I have picked them up I can't shift them. It's like a combination of burnt frankincense, burnt toast, scorching paper, and singed hair. I think something has gone wrong here, this is too ugly to be what was intended. I lit the second stick, put it in the outhouse where the air is fresh, and went back out after ten minutes to be faced with the same burning wood smell. Not quite as ugly as the first stick, but that's only because I didn't subject myself to it for as long. I don't get on with this Kampuram at all.
I expected more of them as well. Especially for the price.
ReplyDeleteThey are expensive. Sometimes that is part of the marketing strategy. Many people judge the quality of a product by the price. They think that if it's cheap it must be bad, and if it's expensive it must be good. And, to be fair, a lot of the time that is true, so some companies will build on that. And if people enjoy paying more because that makes them feel good, so be it. And I expect (or at least hope) that a decent proportion of the profit goes to the workers in India.
DeleteBut with so much really good inexpensive incense available, and so much interesting incense to explore, then Fiore is not a company that is top of my hunt list.
Added to which, they use way too use halmaddi for me. My eyes, nose, mouth, and throat suffered yesterday. I've had to take a break from incense reviewing today.
This line is also certified (ecocert) which adds to the cost.
ReplyDeleteI heard good things about the frankincense varieties (and others) of the Marco Polo line. I do believe it is quality Incense from the naturalness of the ingredients perspective. But as you said, Camphor incense as a single note incense is just not the most attractive, unless you are really into it. And your issue with Halmaddi surely comes on top of that.
The Ecocert is marketing. Yes, they'd pay a few thousand for that certificate. But that certificate doesn't mean they are any more organic or free trade or sustainable than most incense from India. Most farming in India is organic, mainly because the farmers cannot afford chemical fertilisers (and why pay for a fertiliser when there is plenty of cow dung to be had for free!), but they haven't paid for a certificate because they a) can't afford it and/or b) don't see it as worthwhile marketing. I generally assume that food and clothing from India and Egypt is organic. I've been to Egypt - I've seen the farming there. They still use cattle to pull the plough on small holdings - that by itself is more organic and sustainable than the megafarms they have in America which destroy diversity, and they need to have bees brought in because they have removed the eco-structure the bees need, and they do all their farming in planet destroying tractors, but those rich megafarms can afford to pay for their organic certificate. When shopping, I tend to avoid the organic labels, and go for either locally grown food (if its local its going to destroy the planet less to get it to my table) or food from countries like Egypt, Morocco, and India which are highly likely to be organic small-holdings without polluting tractors. I have an instinctive and intellectual distrust of any award or certification that has to be paid for. Proper awards are given to those who deserve it rather than those who have paid for it.
Delete"I do believe it is quality Incense from the naturalness of the ingredients perspective."
DeleteI agree that the ingredients are likely to be as natural as possible. I disagree that natural by itself equals quality. For quality I'd like more thought given to the incense blends. I'd like less use of halmaddi, and more use of other, less intrusive fixatives or sacrificial elements, such as frankincense, benzoin, vanilla, etc. To be fair, there is evidence that these are used as well, but I think the proportions are all wrong. I'd like to experience the scents rather than the fixatives.
I don't think this is quality at all. I think this is crude. I think this a team with little experience or knowledge of incense making who are simply throwing in ingredients they have heard will be good, and thinking that by throwing in more it will make it even better.
I am also, as you know, not someone who has a prejudice against human made products. I prefer to ride a bike than ride a horse, for example. I'm very happy to use the technology that allows us to communicate right now. So I'm not one of those who automatically sees natural as "better" than human made. And I think that pretty much most of us are OK to use candles made of crude oil, but scream "synthetic" and "lab made" when we encounter a fragrance made from the same stuff.
When I was a hippy living in a hippy commune in Tenby in the early Seventies we made candles from wax we bought from the oil refinery just outside Swansea. We would hand make the candles, and sell them door to door and on the street. People would love these candles hand made by hippies living locally. But essentially they were petrochemical candles. Cheap, easy to use, no smell, and a good by-product of an industry that we don't like, but we all use.
In my heart I would love all things to be natural. In my head, I totally accept the reality. But accepting the reality doesn't mean I just cave in. Where we can we make appropriate changes. We prefer to walk or use public transport. We limit our use of energy, and avoid burning wood as much as possible (but here I am running a blog which is about burning incense that contains wood!), and wear natural fibre clothing, etc. But it's not possible or even appropriate to remove the natural entirely from our life.
So that natural v synthetic is always a ping-pong game for me.
I think perhaps that maybe I don't engage with the "natural is best" viewpoint because I feel it's possibly more of an idea than a reality. It's a feel-good thought. Something we can wrap around ourselves to feel good. And, yeah, that's OK. I understand and get that. But I don't think it should be weaponised to use against other small producers. What really matters is not what they are using, but what it smells like.
DeleteBut, yeah, I'm entirely guilty of being someone who leans more toward those producers I like for some oblique reason, such as being small, or natural, or having good packaging.
This is me just spitballing as the Americans say.
"But it's not possible or even appropriate to remove the natural entirely from our life." I meant "remove the synthetic / human-made".
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