The first thing all three of these incenses have in common is that the contact information is the same post office box in the Mysore District of Karnataka State in India even though all the incenses are presented fairly differently. The second thing is that all three of these Tibetan style incenses have major perfume presences and in that sense are actually a completely different family of incenses than your normal Tibetan, Nepalese or Bhutanese incense. I can’t tell if these are legitimate monasteries or if there’s one company at work here designing these incenses to look authentically Tibetan but their similarities are too strong to discount them all from being a line designed by a Mysore area perfumer/incense factory. Some research on the PO Box shows that a number of Tibetan monasteries use it, and I’m assuming their products all come out of this same, for lack of a better word, “clearinghouse.”
And so to take a quick tangent (if you don’t want to read some of this, just drop to the next picture) because it’s a subject that comes up so a lot, what do we mean by perfumed? Natural? Organic? Synthetic? First of all, I’m (obviously) not a chemist or laboratory expert and the incenses we evaluate here, at best, come with an incomplete list of ingredients and/or various promises of how natural or cruelty free or vegan or whatever the box or marketing material contains. It probably should be understood that these various descriptions tend to be from a give and take between manufacturers and importers. From the perspective of ORS and the things we have learned over the year (mostly rumors and conjecture to be honest), we think it’s as close to certain as we can be that Indian incenses, especially over the last few decades where famous natural scents have been severely depleted, use other, largely unnamed ingredients meant to duplicate natural scents. And we believe that when incense companies say “natural” they may not mean it in the same way Americans do. Say there are naturally produced chemicals from organic materials that are altered in a laboratory to imitate a particular scent, is that something you would consider actually natural or not? I think the concern is generally whether synthetic chemicals (or especially toxic or dangerous chemicals) are used in an incense, and I would think in most Indian incenses, even possibly in some incenses where the word “natural” is used, it’s quite possible, even entirely likely, synthetic chemicals are used to some extent. But again without test results about the only thing I can trust is my natural reaction to an incense that is making me uncomfortable.
A selling point on any incense box isn’t going to be “synthetic chemicals used” because absolutely no one would be buying it. Lhochok Palgeri is described on the box as a “Superior Quality Incense.” Well maybe, but that’s a marketing tool right? It’s also described as “A Tibetan incense purely handmade with authentic herbal ingredients, carefully sourced and handpicked specifically from the sacred Himalayan Ranges.” I don’t see any reasons to believe any of this is untrue but what it’s not saying might be even more important, especially when you get a whiff. Because there’s a huge difference between any incense that does and doesn’t use oils or perfumes of some sort and it’s completely obvious these are being used if you can take the fresh batch of unburned incense and give it a sniff or two. If it’s popping with scent (or smells kind of wet) then oils/perfumes are being used. However, the presence of oils doesn’t necessarily tell you what kind of oils they are, they could be anything from a mix of natural essential oils to synthetic perfumes and all points in between. I’d imagine much of this is based on expense. Lots of essential oils are cheap and probably easily enough used in their natural state. So how do we know what is what? Well for the most part we don’t know. I think many of us who have used incense for a while evaluate the possibility by allergic reactions. Does the aroma get you stuffy or sting your eyes or maybe even make you nauseous? Well some natural ingredients probably do that too, but if your body is telling you all those things then you probably don’t want to keep using them whatever is the case. Think of backflow cones, and the smell that comes from adding chemicals to make the smoke sink instead of rise. How is that making you feel?
And to get back to Lhochok Palgeri, the statement about authentic herbal ingredients can be true while they’re adding synthetic ingredients or chemicals too. Mark my words though, I don’t know if that’s true and if I’m actually being objective, I can literally only guess, but again, it’s often what is not said, not what is. Even when the company may be telling you something, hell even when I am so close to certain on something, I’d still have some room in my head for the possibility it’s not true. I’m afraid unless I see some lab or chemistry report of an incense handled by a trained scientist in aromatics with a list of ingredients, I’m always going to be more reserved in my opinion and not pass through comments that have their facts mixed up. So enough about that…
OK now I am really back to Lhochok Palgeri, but I really set this all up because it came in an order from Monkcense, a nice little Etsy shop with a whole bunch of incenses I had not heard of before and the owner was really kind enough to send along a whole bunch of inch long samples of other incenses they carried and after trying over half a dozen of them, I realized they were all like the three incenses I’m going to review here, in fact with samples so short a lot of them actually smelled exactly the same to me. They feel at base traditional Tibetans but they have been practically steroid-infused with some really strong perfume/oil mixes and I was surprised to find that at least so far while I didn’t consider these mixes bad on the face on it, sometimes they aligned really well with the bases and sometimes they set off a whole lot of pinging and ponging. And so I have coined all these as “perfumed traditionals.” Lhochok Palgeri is as good as any other incense to start with in this vein, in the sense that absolutely no ingredients are listed here. This incense actually remind me mostly of the kinds of Indian charcoals that will have mixes that blend florals, cooking herbs and all sorts of other things into incenses that are really hard to parse. Burning this I’m reminded of like dill or celery seed combined with something evergreen and some fancy floral all at once. Some of the aspects I’m not even sure I’ve smelled in a Tibetan incense before, so it starts off being really fascinating. But my gut feeling is strongly wondering what I’m going to feel like after 5 or 10 sticks of this? Is it going to get under my skin or start to irritate me? Because it feels like almost everything in this is dialed up to the loudest volume possible, like nothing was structured to act as foreground or background so it kind of rolls up into white noise. And if you use ash to burn these, these incenses will sometimes transfer this massive aromatic punch to your ash. So despite that this is an original mix, I feel with every stick it’s just a little too powerful or overwhelming, even more so than some of the loudest Indian charcoals and masalas.
Now while Namdroling Monastery Tibetan Herbal Incense is purportedly from a monastery it holds the same postal office box that Lhochok Palgeri has; however, it does look like this monastery is in the same district. This time ingredients are listed: juniper, liquorice, agarwood, myrrh, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, spikenard, nutmeg, saffron, vetiver, kusum flower, sandalwood powder, and resins. What I noticed right away is the spices like cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and nutmeg were all much more highly concentrated in this than they usually are in a Tibetan incense, most of these are clearly carried on a wave of perfume oil. I don’t imagine that any of these ingredients are cost prohibitive to fake so the strong spice front seems pretty genuine to me, and it is actually quite nice. But even if this oil is natural or mostly natural it is still loud as hell and so up front that it practically lives in your nostrils. And this is coming from someone who has been incense saturated for decades at this point and actually doesn’t mind loud Indian masalas that often overwhelm a good fraction of the community. Think of the kind of cinnamon you’d get from a concentrated bottle of essential oil and imagine firehosing it in all directions. OK I exaggerate of course, but one good way of telling you how powerful this is is lighting two sticks of it at once. Anyway, the point of this once again is subtlety is lost here, or perhaps it is if you don’t have a room big enough for this to dissipate and spread out. And you really need that for an incense so heavy in spice. And believe me I want to like this and actually do on some level, but the perfume is so intense here it almost smells like charry wood or some type of overheating. But after Lhockok Palgeri, it’s hard to really look it at the same as the dozens of other actual Tibetan monastery incenses that, if they use oils at all, do so in a measured way that doesn’t overtake anything going on in the middle or bottom. It feels like there’s a company at play that creates these for monasteries or, well, yeah I won’t go there…
The same PO box is listed for Thekchenling Monastery Incense as well; it is apparently marketed by Sera Thekchenling Lachi Society. Which is perhaps a little odd when you consider that Sera Thekchenling Monastery is in Lhasa, Tibet; it is apparently one of the biggest monasteries in Lhasa and something of a tourist stop. But as the incense is still part of this family of incenses with the perfumes, it is certainly curious about how all this works. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an ingredient list on this one, but it is definitely quite distinct from the Namdroling. Thekchenling Monastery Incense goes for what feels like an herbal-floral mix, one not terribly far off the Lhachok Palgeri. There are some obvious woods on the bottom, but just like with the other two, everything else in the mix feels pushed up front due to the weight of the oil mix. Because of this it’s very hard to parse anything specifically. My thoughts were sort of like somewhere between a ganden grass/mild cooking herb meets a very perfumed white flower floral mix. In fact what strikes me as so odd about these three incenses is the mix of traditional and modern. I should also mention that after this went out I could still smell the afterscent of this incense, even after giving some time in between sticks, louder than the one I was trying to remember. That is a lot of oil if it’s going into the ash and staying there.
So ultimately these are not incenses I would really classify as monastery incenses or even traditionals. Some of what I’m smelling I would be hard pressed to be found in an old recipe, there is just too much in the way of the kind of modern floral scents you might find in Shoyeido or Nippon Kodo perfumed sticks for that. In a way the fusion is definitely kind of interesting, but I also find it pretty exhausting, loud and relentless. Some of this is just the sheer power of the incenses, but it’s also this sort of weird conflict between pretty florals and the rugged herbal/woody catalog of most Tibetan incenses. I’m always left questioning whether all this oil on top is drowning anything out as well. Ultimately by the time one of these long sticks burns down I feel that it’s kind of worn out its welcome, I’m starting to pay more attention to how I’m feeling than the aroma itself. What this meant for me is the dozen or more incenses in this vein I tried samples of I’m not likely to buy full boxes of or review because the fatigue would ultimately be grinding. Use sparingly if you try them and experiment first with how much space you have as these are likely to be too much for a lot of ORS readers.
It has been a really long time since I did new reviews of Nepali or Tibetan-style Indian incenses. In the current era I don’t know if there is one dominant shopping point for these types of incenses like there was when Essence of the Ages was active, although Hither & Yon in Hawaii is a good source for lines like Dhoop Factory and you can usually find a lot of the more common Nepali incenses through places like Incense Warehouse. The problem, which is something I don’t think you find in actual Tibetan incenses, is there are a lot of poor Nepali incenses. When I explored them back in the 00s I ended up getting rid of a great deal of them because they were basically just unpleasant and cheap woody incenses without much in the way of aroma. The worst felt like bad perfumes on junk sawdust. But of course this isn’t true of all of them (several of the Dhoop Factory incenses are upper echelon Tibetan-style incenses in my book). Nowadays there are a number of smaller shops on the internet and across Etsy that actually show there are multiple traditions (or maybe exporters) of these sorts of incenses. I even dug up what appears to be a rather interesting line of perfumed Tibetan-style incenses sources in India. So I got busy and have ordered quite a few Nepali incenses, just mostly going on intuition to pick things out. Along the way I’ve also rediscovered sources for things I reviewed way back and will update those accordingly. The first two here are incenses handmade in Nepal for California’s Chagdud Gonpa Foundation. Both of these can be found at the 
Perhaps even more impressive than the Riwo Sangchod is Chagdud Gonpa Foundations’s 
Here’s another new nunnery incense I loved off the bat, and one that is quite a bit different than all of the red sticks usually created by nuns in Tibet. The ingredients here include white and purple sandalwood, saffron, black agarwood, nutmeg, clove, cardamom, rhizome of conic gymnadenia, and fructus amomi (another type of cardamom). It’s a very woody incense primarily but does not lack for a middle.
Probably most noticeable is the big spice mix in the center of it. Where the wood could over-dominate, this mix really helps push things to the center and keep any campfire like elements from overwhelming things. It’s actually a fairly complex mix, but the nutmeg is probably the most in front of this mix, everything else feels largely right behind it. The incense sort of hints but falls short of being sweet, which makes all the spices shift a bit more in the direction of the cardamom(s). There’s a bit of thickness in the middle that’s a little hard to explain the origin of (it may just be the high quality of ingredients), but it keeps things quite rich. The presence of “black agarwood” sort of implies a higher grade of the wood, but I don’t detect anything abnormal to the way agarwood usually shows up in a Tibetan blend, it’s fairly mellow here as well. I’d suspect there must be some other woods in the mix as the ones listed don’t usually lead to what I’d call the more evergreen qualities that something like juniper, cypress or even cedar might impart. But probably what is most subtle about this is there feels like a light floral sort of mix at the very top, it’s not something I notice every time I burn it, but it’s a note that really ties everything together. Overall, the 
When I first started jumping into Tibetan Monastery incenses in the mid to late 00s, it was incenses like the two Holy Lands, the original Highland and a few others I’ve forgotten that really got my attention because of what has become known as “barnyard” sorts of notes, or in other words musks of unknown but either animalic origins or the creators are doing a good enough job making it seem that way from plants. They are generally called barnyard as they recall the scents of being near various animals, and of course you might imagine this won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but there’s a certain segment of the incense population that really goes for scents like this. One of the reasons the sources are hard to call is that musks tend to have a really strong and powerful stamp on the environment depending on how much they are used and incenses like these may come close to that, but they are usually somewhere in the middle. Incenses like this are still relatively uncommon now but it was to great surprise and delight that the 
The musk on this is really wonderful, largely because it melds with just as high a spice mix. Incenses like these are often among my very favorites, they are poweful rich and multi-faceted at the get go, and perhaps more importantly they are tremendously addictive. I am pretty sure I burned through at least seven or eight sticks of this before I even started to think about the review. The mix of the clove, myrobalan and black cardamon really give this a unique profile as well, I’m so used to cinnamon in the mix of spices that when it’s not there this profile can be quite a bit different. It’s a little bit more clove and black pepper than something you’d be used to in a confectionary. But of course with the sandalwood and agarwood in here there is plenty of woodiness although it is perhaps tertiary to the musk and spice. It also feels like there are some oils in this of some provenance as the aroma is quite intense. And in case it’s not clear all of these things work to a really unified whole as well – I tend to find incenses that have this unity as well as a lot of complexity are almost always the most fascinating and carefully crafted. So yes if you have a Tibetan monastery shopping list, this one’s going to go near the top, I ordered a back up roll really quickly as I tend to mow through rolls of things like this. It’ll show up on the Tibetan Hall of Fame as soon as I get around to updating it.
One day in conversation within the last year I mentioned to Josh Matthews of Dimension 5 that I had some Tibetan incense powders including some older ones stored away. If I’m remembering this correctly, Josh expressed some curiosity over what he might be able to do with these powders and so I sent him samples of I think three or four of them, including the 
As a powder heavy in musk and spices, Josh used a number of different animal sourced musks to complement these. V. 3 takes the Highland incense powder, adds civet, muskrat, and hyraceum (these three animalics are in every incense in this review), as well as Vietnamese agarwood. All of the musks highlight those in the powder while the cherry-note fronted agarwood (and a fantastic one to boot) gives it all a really unique and lovely twist, creating a sort of sweetness and spice that expands the palate of the powder considerably, creating all sorts of new interactions. The animalics are particularly powerful in this one, giving their potent stamp on the nearby environment, heavy and memory impressive. In fact, after rotating this from V 7 during review, the potency of both the incense and the animalics themselves were particularly highlighted. The new ingredients bring the Highland powder up to a premium level, while the powder provides a plethora of notes for these ingredients to interact with. Of the original four I received, this is one of the incenses in Josh’s first test group, but I believe there were only slight refinements, as there wasn’t any need to make it much better than it already was. This Tibetan-Japanese hybrid, if you will, really charts out some interesting new territory in incense, a whole range of interactions and combinations not found commonly elsewhere. I’d even add that between its original and this version, I’ve sampled this over a half dozen times and it feels more impressive with each use. It’s almost like you wouldn’t necessarily think that the powder would match well with a sweeter aloeswood but then it does oh so well.
Highland X D5 V. 6 is quite a bit different and to use a Baieido comparison, it’s sort of like the Hakusui to the V 3’s Ogurayama (wood or stick). The ingredients listed include the Highland powder, along with both Kalimantan and Papua agarwood, which are then matched with cinnamon, clove and benzoin, and the three animalics. I noticed with this one that I was constantly reminded of other Japanese incenses, for sure it has the same sort of spice and wood mix to something like 
V. 7 takes the Highland powder and the same animalics as in the previous two Vs, but combines these with Mysore sandalwood and benzoin, which definitely changes the whole base compared to the previous incenses. The effect of using sandalwood rather than agarwood is that the latter sort of creates an edifice to build on while using fine Mysore powder strengthens the Highland powder’s foundation, as if it dares you to imagine a finer grade of sandalwood was used to create it originally. The difference in woods also makes you pay attention to the relationship these ingredients have with the three animalics. They’re not quite as sharply used on this one, more delicately placed, which feels appropriate without having the agarwood resins to highlight. Josh uses these animalics pretty liberally in these incenses. I don’t think any of them are overdone, but V. 7 may have been my favorite placement of them, as like the Mysore powder, they kind of easily substitute for the Highland Powder’s own muskier elements. So in a way this might actually be the closest one of these sticks gets to making an actual high-end Highland incense. I often get this sort of desert-like impression with sandalwood incenses as the good stuff can have some drier elements (especially when you think sandalwood still largely ages in its trees rather than buried underground) which sort of relate differently to the spices. So of all the versions I’ve tried, this one actually feels the closest to the powder itself in match, but don’t discount what even these quality ingredients can do to transform this. It was towards the very end of my appraisal that I started to notice how the benzoin sweetens this and at the same time I would get notes like dried peaches which added a real subtlety to the mix.
One of the relatively new and fine acquisitions at incense-traditions.ca, 
What I like about this one is it’s a good example of being both light and complex. and it really surpasses its list of ingredients in the kind of notes that spiral out from it, it feels like something really clever is going on in the mix. On top the evergreens mix to form an olfactory lattice like the tops of a coniferous forest. That sort of spicy-amber mix commonly found in nunnery incenses acts as something of a middle; you can recognize it, but the incense feels heavy enough in woods that it isn’t as dominant as it is in, say, the Gang-Zi Mani or the Sangdanli Nunnery Temple incenses. But since those are both classics, dialing those great notes back has to be balanced out in some way and that’s where the mix of sweet cypress and evergreen notes with all these unique floral touches (possibly related to the way saffron can mix with other things) works so well to turn this into something quite unique. And I have to say both this and the two I compared it to are incenses that probably smacked me on the 4th or 5th stick, I remember feeling very different about this before I gave it a few weeks of rest, when I came back to it I was truly amazed. One for the shopping list indeed and a tremendous find.
Nice to see a couple more incenses from a monastery that makes very distinctive and unique incenses. Previously ORS had covered both their regular 
For the 
The 
Josh Matthews is back from the labs with two more kyara-fronted incenses, both that I think are musts for fans of deep aloeswood incenses. These two are slightly contrasting as well in that Calculus presents a very complex and involved kyara incense that ricochets off of different ingredients, while Paradox F keeps it largely to just the woods and exerts its complexity from within. Both are different but with equally inspiring results.
Calculus, as one can tell from the name, is a very complex formula – it really earns its name. I would say Josh threw the whole textbook at it, but that would imply it’s not as measured and calculated as it is. It’s an incense that will really keep one busy and intrigued with a broad and rare pallet of ingredients, starting with kyara and using “Oud Royale 1985,” “Maroke LTD,“ and “Maroke Sultan Qaboos,” all ouds from 
In many ways a very different incense than Calculus, Paradox F is a combination of a kyara front with what I would call, perhaps very, high end agarwood (and ouds). I’ve probably mentioned a few times in these pages that a lot of times I actually prefer the top end woods tht aren’t kyara because they tend to have some of the darkest and richest notes in aloeswood without the greenish kyara addition that pushes things into different territory, and sometimes that is what I want. Here you really get both. The list of ingredients is fairly simple: kyara, King Super Malaysian agarwood, “Sultan Abdul Hamit” and “Sultan Qaboos” ouds from Ensar Oud, and aged birch oil. While there are probably some secrets in here as well, the list reflects that we are dealing with a few very high-end woods and oils and letting those speak for themselves. Since my first agarwood experiences, I’ve always experienced great agarwood in its highest resolution as similar to something like a finely made, wood-based grandfather clock, something polished up so you can see every whorl and line in the wood. This is a really fine example of something like that, a really cohesive incense that has an absolutely wonderful green kyara note at the top, while every layer below it speaks of memory-triggering dark woods, with a focus on black resin. It is an absolute feast for the wood connoisseur, and I should absolutely underline that Josh is getting better and better at this with every release, this one even reminding me of expensive Japanese classics like Baieido Kyara Kokoh or Kourindo KourindaiKyara. Josh has also configured these sticks to burn a bit longer than some previous Dimension 5 goodies, allowing one to have a rich, indulgent experience. Keep in mind that even with a simple list of ingredients, high level woods have many notes of their own and this one spins them out with every second of the burn. The kyara notes are lofty and immense with the sort of forest meets cooling green end of that spectrum moving slightly into grapefruit/citrus areas. The other woods and ouds bring a touch of caramel and a nice sense of spice to the middle, all of which merge well with the wonderful charry sorts of black notes.
This is the final installment for the most recent batch of Epika Earth incenses I received in my most recent Etsy order. They have so, so many more sticks and other goodies at their actual website and I am absolutely sure I liked most of their offerings enough to go for another order again in the future. There is something really warm and comforting about a lot of them. Perhaps its because so many of their incenses are essential oil mixes, but I like how these often create almost mythical libations, like you’re holding some amazing drink in your hand. The last group of these incenses are a couple that look like they are part of a Sacred line, a couple that are not part of any line and look like standards, and then a few backflow cones were also sent which are a bit more difficult to talk about as I don’t like the format while on the other hand these would likely be tremendously good cones if they weren’t.
So first of all we have the Celebration of Life stick (part of the Sacred line), which is different but obviously related in an aromatic way to the 
The 
Epika Earth were also kind enough to send no less than three different kinds of backflow cones. As I offered to review their incenses prior to their seeing the information on our website, I thought I’d use this opportunity to talk about these types of cones first as they’ve grown in popularity since they started showing up however many years back. The simple idea for a backflow cone is a hole is drilled down the center and “something” is added to the mix in order to make the smoke heavy enough to come down through the hole and drift slowly down any number of artistically designed backflow holders. It’s absolutely understandable why people would think this is cool, as smoke pouring from a ceramic chimney or dragon’s mouth is a neat effect. I even bought a cool dragon backflow holder which I managed to break in the middle of these reviews, chipping off just the right spot (one of the dragon wings) that should have held the smoke in. But the thing is, even in practice you have to do a lot of shifting and have a lot of patience for the smoke of a burning backflow cone to make it all the way down to the bottom of a cascade. For me the smoke never got farther than the first slide after the dragon’s mouth and I think I got one cone to get all the way down to the bottom once.
I was realizing just in the last few days how many new incenses that Incense Traditions is bringing in from Tibet and Bhutan, it almost feels like just as I make a catch up order, I’ll be working on a review and then somehow come across a new batch. I will just say I am really appreciative of these efforts, these geographical areas are quite large, and it almost feels like every new incense puts another tack on the map. Tibetan incenses for me are often some of the most unexpected and innovative in the world, there are practically no limits to the types of aromas that come from incenses with such a wide array of ingredients to choose from. I try to get these reviewed as soon as I can (at least during ORS “in season” which is usually November-January, but is likely to stretch into April this year) but I sometimes rotate reviews out if they show out of stock. Unfortunately, lines can disappear about as fast as they appear as well, but for the most part IT work pretty hard to get incenses back in as available.
So along with the recently reviewed Dhe-Tsang Golden Essence and Dzongsar Traditional Incense, this review of 
Olfactory Rescue Service 
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