Olfactory Rescue Service

I hadn’t put it together right away in my head, but Good Incense is something of a sister imprint to Bhagwan Incense. It seems from looking at the site that Good Incenses are more affordably priced by comparison to Bhagwan, they don’t come in the fancy boxes and are just simply presented in wrappers. But there are honestly a lot of nice incenses in this line as well, including a trend of similarly constructed incenses that present a different tradition to what I have experienced in other Indian exports. It’s a line that intrigues me quite a bit, definitely quality but not having the hallmarks of incenses more commonly seen in the west; it’s the kind of trend you hope for.

The first of these we’ll discuss is the Gold. The only clues we have are halmaddi and sweet floral notes but this is an incense that has an intriguing almost root-like nip at the top of the bouquet. It’s similar to ways I have seen patchouli or vetivert used in some incenses and it’s a note I’ve always liked a lot personally, it’s kind of green-banana in a way. There is also some level of an herb like tobacco in the mix. This is of course all grounded in a very friendly charcoal-masala mix with a lot of breadth in the middle. You can smell the halmaddi for sure, but the stated florals are too much of a mix to really identify anything specific from, but they certainly play an important component in that breadth. So overall this is a very unique incense, it’s the kind of thing you want to share with friends just to get their take on it as it’s sort of like a friendly incense modified in a slightly unique direction. I continue to remain really fascinated with it, it really keeps you on your toes.

The Good Incense Patchouli looks to be fairly close to a dusted charcoal as a style. It would not surprise me at all if this was Madhavadas sourced as there’s a lot of vanilla and sandalwood coming off the burn. Vanilla often seems fairly comfortable next to patchouli for some reason, it’s not a match I’d make on my own, but it often works as it does here. In my recent Asayu review I talked about patchouli variations to hopefully give some idea where I sit with the scent as a whole. The more premium, essential oil heavy sticks with it tend to fatigue me (probably because living in California I used to come across people wearing the oil as an aromatic), so this match-up of a more leaf-oriented scent and the vanilla/sandalwood base fronting an oil that’s a bit greener than your average essential oil is probably a bit closer to my personal preferences. That is, the greener a patchouli is the better. So not only does this hit that spot but it’s also variant from other Indian sticks that are roughly in the same region. The herb will always fall somewhere in the middle for me, I like a good one but I’ll likely come more across it in reviews than looking for it myself if that makes sense.

I’ve probably walked out my story about walking through Sacramento’s Capitol Rose Garden a dozen times by now, and I do because it sets a sort of basis for how I perceive rose. And I don’t mean something like a deep Bulgarian rose absolute or something more expensive and premium, I just mean that it’s a measure for getting what a bunch of roses smell like walking between them. I bring this up because the Good Incense Rose is shockingly good at getting this smell dead on. You’re not even just getting a general rose-direction floral scent here, it actually does smell a lot like actual roses, which is no mean feat given the costs it would take to make this actually happen. Sure it’s a little sweet and there does indeed seem to be some halmaddi here, but all this does is just give a bit of comfort and backing to the floral scent. Compared to all of the pink stick mixes across various companies, this actually comes across as being slightly more authentic and true to the actual scent. 15g at 3 euros for this is a deep bargain, I can’t even think of a deal anywhere close to this for this particular scent. I might add that this strikes me as being the same lineage as the Balsamic Amber and Gold so it’s equally as intriguing in that sense.

And to add to that lineage is a very nice Saffron Masala. This has what I might call the most on point saffron scent in an incense that one can imagine, bereft of the kind of additions you usually find with it. The caveat as always is an ingredient as rare as this doesn’t really have essential oils you can fuel an incense with but creators of it usually have something that smells like the herb that still works really nicely. In many ways it’s just the clarity of this that’s so attractive, while there’s a charcoal-halmaddi-masala base that helps to broaden the incense’s aroma (this base works really well in all of this lineage’s sticks), it doesn’t detract from this nice spicy top mix. I often find myself searching for the saffron note in an incense, it’s nice to find a masala that makes it really obvious, not to mention quite simple on top. If you like saffron this is a no-brainer. It actually gives me a little nostalgia of how saffron smelled in the incenses of the 90s.

Vetiver (vetivert) feels like a different lineage altogether and is a very interesting dry masala with a few different notes. I wouldn’t even think of vetivert being a holiday sort of scent but the way this brings out mint and foresty notes constantly reminds me of that sort of thing, neither are notes I tend to associate with most vetivert incenses but they sometimes even pop from the fresh stick. And so even though this stick has more familiar sorts of vetivert notes, it has a much broader palette which tends to send the nose out searching along the burn. Vetivert usually seems to have deeper rooty or earthy sort notes which I mentally file closer to patchouli and for sure this sort of dry masala has some similarities to patchouli dry masalas as well. But vetivert can also tend to grassy and more citrus like notes and so the more earthy part of the scent seems more like its bunched up in the middle, while these other notes play off the base in strange and unique ways. The description includes halmaddi, but in this case its presence is probably pretty minor. Overall I do think this is a cool experience for sure. I wouldn’t have considered a more earthy, rooty scent to base something almost brighter and more high altitude but it’s part of what makes this an interesting incense. It’s likely to stretch one’s own interpretation of what vetivert can do.

Some of the other Good Incenses I tried didn’t fare as well. In all of my incense exploring life I’ve never understood why Red Sandalwood is prized as an aromatic; however, putting it in a stick on its own isn’t likely to move all but the most eccentric of us. This one just smells like dull campfire wood to me, but to be fair I’ve never tried a Red Sandalwood that made me feel otherwise. The Golden Sandal is simply neither, it doesn’t even do wood and furniture polish particularly well. Mystifyingly the sandalwood in the Sandalwood Saffron can be smelled just a smidge on the fresh stick too, but overall feels a bit of a chemical mess in the burn and ultimately neither. Both of these I’d take to task with original exporter, unfortunately in the West this is the kind of thing the importer has to either absorb as costs or hope to thin stock in the catalog, maybe something a lot of readers are not particularly aware of. One feels that Benzoin Supreme may be of similar provenance to these in that it has a similar chemical or perfume finish, but at least the scent lands somewhere in the ballpark as if the resin end was refined to some end – it’s not even that bad once it gets a cloud about it, although you never do lose the chemical note in the background behind it.

I had better hopes for Sambrani. It is described as “[a] delightful herbal, menthol, mineral, floral, and vanilla scent.” I don’t have any problem with that other than the first adjective, as the extreme bitterness of the burn pretty much overwhelms everything about this mix to an eye-watering distraction. Menthol’s a tough call in incense and here a lot of its better attributes are left to an edge around the shocking remains of the rest of it. You almost have to recover after burning even a little of it. As a contrast, Summer Bouquet is just a sort of fruity floral mix and definitely not a bad incense at all, in fact I started liking it a bit more on later burns. Its supposedly made from Mt Arunachala flowers and seems to have that more natural yet maybe slightly-not-perfect burn of actual floral material rather than a lot of perfumes. It kind of hovers a bit around a harvest-like plum or grapes sort of scent. Like a lot of florals that verge fruity it’s probably not terribly memorable, but I would imagine some liking this for sure.

Both Bhagwan Incense and Good Incense have a lot I haven’t covered so do look around the catalogs a bit, the incenses come from a number of different Indian companies, and so many of these can be surprises. I understand from Eugene that this stock is just the beginning!