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Pure Incense Sticks, Made With Natural Ingredients
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Pure incense is crafted completely from all-natural ingredients, without any artificial chemicals, scents, colours or preservatives at all. Scented only with pure essential oils, petals, roots, woods and resins, and coloured with organic dyes, pure incense is gentle and clean burning, with little smoke. A few hundred years ago, all incense was made like this. Artisanally hand ground, mixed and rolled in small batches.
Doesn't that sound like nice incense? The type you'd like burning in your home, during your yoga, meditation and relaxation? Gently scenting your air with the peaceful aroma of smoldering natural aromatics? Yes. Absolutely.
So if this incense is so good, and obviously what almost everyone who burns incense would prefer, then why isn't it everywhere? Because it costs more. Not so much to the people who purchase it, this type of incense is usually in the same price range as normal incense, but to the producers and manufacturers. Despite essential oils often being perceived as cheap, many of the most sought after incense oils, such as agarwood, jasmine, rose and sandalwood, are very expensive. So expensive that, were most synthetic incense manufacturers to just swap out their chemicals for these oils, they'd struggle to stay in business.
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That's the only reason that, today, artificial incense prevails. Incense manufacturers are able to make more money scenting their incense with synthetic chemical compounds than natural essential oils.
The fragrance industry employs the use and combination of over 3100 synthetic scent compounds, with a typical rose, one of the most common scents in incense, containing over a dozen chemicals. Realistically, that's a lot less chemicals than we have in other things we use everyday, but it's still more than we should have burning several feet away from us. Especially since less than 43% of these scent compounds have been tested by the FDA, with many of the tested chemicals labelled as carcinogenic - A substance that are directly involved in the formation of cancerous cells.
Because of all of these harsh and sometimes harmful ingredients, there's a lot of people out there that would love to burn incense but just can't. With common side-effects consisting of things like a lot of runny noses, sore throats and sneezing, there are some more sensitive individuals that can experience serious breathing difficulties, headaches and even itchiness just from handling it.
Now we're not saying that no one will ever sneeze burning pure incense, there are obviously some people out there who are just sensitive to certain things, especially among people more prone to allergies and asthma sufferers. That said, most people who do try pure incense find that they experience no side effects, even if they did with the last incense the tried. It's very different to what people expect incense to be like.
Pure incense isn't harsh or overpowering. It's primal, a connection to a simpler world where incense was no more than a few wood shavings and petals sprinkled over a hot coal, gentle sizzling resins and spices. The incense that would burn during the meditation of countless monks high in the Himalayas, of a billion heartfelt prayers. Where time was taken gathering the ingredients, grinding them together and rolling them onto a splinter of freshly whittled bamboo. When incense was incense, and not just another ancient and beautiful thing that we've ruined for the sake of convenience, just so we can make an extra pound or a few more dollars per packet. Incense is, first and foremost, an item of spirituality and not business.
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Some More Benefits of Pure Incense |
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Although commonly thought of only as an air freshener, the burning of all natural incense has actually been found to have a range of positive physical and psychological effects. We've only noted a few of the more common benefits, as we've recently dedicated an entire page to this. For a much more comprehensive list of the health benefits associated with the burning of pure incense, please visit our page on the benefits of natural incense.
01 - Being in the same environment as incense has been linked to heightened levels of creativity. The basis for this is very similar to listening to music - through providing inspiration and motivation. Aromas are also a very powerful emotional memory trigger, which can help to stimulate thoughts and creativeness (Collins, 2012). Blue lotus and agarwood are particularly effective scents, due to their distinctive and psychoactive nature.
02 - When we're angry, stressed or upset our brains release stress hormones. These hormones cause inflammation which, in turn, causes the release of inflammatory proteins called cytokines. These proteins can greatly impair cognitive function, almost 'clouding' the natural process. This is a major reason why stressed people can perform worse than they would normally. Eating and smelling vanilla has been proven to naturally reduce and deplete these stress hormones, as well as sooth your nervous system and promote the release of serotonin. A study at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center showed that patients undergoing MRIs who breathed vanilla scented air reported 63 percent less anxiety than those who breathed unscented air. Rose incense is shown to have similar effects.
03 - Certain fragrances trigger a response from our limbic system, a complex system of nerves and networks in the brain strongly associated with mood, causing it to release serotonin. Serotonin is a chemical our bodies naturally produce, with higher levels linked to lower blood pressure and a balanced mood, and lower levels linked with depression and diabetes. Serotonin is also a natural, albeit mild, painkiller, suggesting that some scents could be useful for lesser ailments, such as headaches. Rose incense is particularly good at stimulating the release of serotonin.
04 - A recent medical study determined that when inhaled, frankincense resin and incense smoke activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain which are closely associated with emotion and depression. This stimulates the production and release of TRPV3 – a protein which helps to drastically reduce anxiety and the symptoms of depression (Moussaieff et al., 2008).
05 - Incense can also be used as an aphrodisiac. This is because the area of the brain that it effects, the hypothalamus, controls the creation and release of hormones that regulate everything from sleep, appetite and mood to libido. When burned to help set the mood for a romantic evening, the release of the hormone testosterone is stimulated. With lower levels of testosterone linked to lower libidos, a little spike in your production can make all the difference to some people. It also increases blood flow to the sexual organs. Lotus, jasmine and vanilla are the most common aphrodisiacs, although warm, musky and woody scents have also been found to work well for women.
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Our Pure Incense |
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Our incense is 100% natural and hand crafted from the finest organic ingredients. We don't use machines, just a pestle, mortar and ancient South Indian hand rolling techniques. We take our base ingredients, all of which are listed below, and we grind them up. When the mixture's the right consistency, we carefully pour in the precious essential oils, petals and resins used to scent the incense before carefully hand kneading it all together. When it's all done, we slowly hand roll it onto white bamboo sticks. To finish off the batch, we might dust it down with a little organic dye for a little colour.
We are proud to supply spas, health centers and temples all across the world, with our products favoured above countless others for their exceptional quality. The beautiful thing about incense used in worship is that the commercial aspect is completely removed. It just doesn't matter, it's a person and their most sacred belief, they don't want to offer anything but the best they're able to obtain. We are proud to supply this 'temple grade' incense.
Base ingredients: Spring water, pure bamboo charcoal, sandalwood powder (Santalum album), vanilla powder (Vanilla planafolia), gum elemi (Canarium luzonicum), makko powder (Machillus thunbergil), tragacanth gum (Astragalus tragacanthus) gum Arabic (Acacia nilotica), gum opoponax (Opopanax chironium), gum labdanum (Cistus ladaniferus), gum copal (Bursera odorata), mastic (Pistacia lentiscus), gum dammar (Shorea wiesneri), myrrh resin (Commiphora myrrha), frankincense resin (Boswellia sacra).
These are just our base ingredients, used in almost every stick of our incense. If you want to learn about our scents, then you can find the full list on our new ingredients page. Have a play with our interactive world map and discover where we source all of our ingredients, which ones are grown organically and what they all smell like.
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