{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreibeevin2klpwyxcefwhdwu6bmprfoh46cvve3hmq2tzuyfm235txi",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:2kqq3nabzjybtegvocpz4doa/app.bsky.feed.post/3mdsjxtwssmd2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreifmyleastcfzxoyg6z27nk3lwf5d7zlofos2663xzqbt3fe5aducu"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/webp",
    "size": 26206
  },
  "path": "/blog/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-27T12:37:50.416Z",
  "site": "https://nathanupchurch.com",
  "tags": [
    "over ten dollars each for premium Japanese sticks",
    "liquid plastic",
    "[1]",
    "[2]",
    "[3]",
    "[4]",
    "pennies per gram for eucalyptus leaf",
    "top-end agarwood",
    "Jeomra’s Räucherwelt",
    "Image courtesy of the Library of Congress",
    "Irene",
    "Tennendo Kyara",
    "not especially compelling",
    "↩︎"
  ],
  "textContent": "Whether discussing wine, spirits, perfumes, or incense, there is much back and forth on the subject of quality. On the one hand, there are the connoisseurs flashing their three-plus digit purchases on enthusiast forums, and on the other, there are the humble, salt-of-the-earth naysayers gleefully reminding them of that time a bottle of supermarket swill beat out a premium bottle in a wine competition. From fractions of a penny per stick for “hand dipped” fare, to over ten dollars each for premium Japanese sticks , the world of incense has something for every budget. It seems that for every person opining on the sublime beauty of the .5mm green-oil kyara and musk sticks they picked up for a trifling four-figures, there is another insisting that dollar-store punks soaked in a pungent bath of liquid plastic and industrial aroma chemicals are just as good, and that anyone enjoying incense that cost more than pennies per stick is either a poseur or a rube brainwashed by the flashy marketing[1] and pretty boxes of the Japanese incense industry. Amidst the bickering, newcomers to this fragrant world want to understand what quality means in the context of incense. How do they know that they’re buying high quality incense? Where do they find it? How does quality relate to price? The reality is that there are as many answers as there are people, but I hope that I can add some nuance to the conversation, address some misconceptions, and, if I’m lucky, provide a little clarity on the subject.\n\nA piece of cultivated white kinam bead waste atop two lower quality cultivated “skins.”\n\n## What is quality, anyway? #\n\nIn order to talk about quality, we first have to come to some agreement as to what the word means. In the Tibetan and Chinese traditions, incense is used not only for fragrance, but also as medicine. Therefore, a stick made with a preponderance of very fresh and pungent material prized for its medicinal properties might be considered high quality, although to you and I it may smell like burning twigs with a hint of sulfur. If, like me, you understand that there is approximately zero compelling evidence that incense is of any medicinal value whatsoever, you will likely disagree with this assessment. I have also heard that consumers of Chinese incense value incense that uses few to no concentrates, whether natural extracts or synthetics. To this market, a dry and subtle sandalwood stick might be perceived as being of high quality, whereas consumers of Indian incense—today almost entirely a product of perfumery—may find it utterly underwhelming compared to their usual nag champa, powerful enough to fragrance a large open space during puja. In the west, there is significant consumer demand for natural products[2], so incense marketed as “natural” will be perceived as being higher quality.\n\nIt’s plain to see that quality means different things to different people. But I wonder if it might be simply described as the degree to which something meets the _multiple_ goals or needs of the person assessing its quality. As we’ll see, enjoyment comes from many places. I strongly believe that, where it relates to consumables, the hang-up on raw sensory pleasure as the stick by which quality is measured needs to be put to bed. Was the week in which you had the most orgasms or ate the tastiest meals the highest quality week in your life? Perhaps it was, but I think that’s unlikely.\n\nI rarely drink wine, but even I have become radically bored with hearing countless recitations of the time a handful of sommeliers roundly embarrassed themselves by preferring a glass of supermarket wine over the competing _Chateau Au Frou-Frou 1995_. Beyond the tiresome repetition, this sneering retort to those who enjoy wines priced beyond a box of Barefoot belies a fundamental misunderstanding of why people buy expensive wines in the first place. Sure, posturing happens, but an enthusiast will snag that $400 grand cru not because they want to show off on Instagram, nor because they necessarily think it will taste better than a cheap bottle, but because they want to know what the output of the estate tastes like. They want the 2008 vintage because they hear that the humidity that year had a unique effect on the grapes. They aren’t familiar with the profile of César grapes, and would like to try a single-varietal bottle using them. They like the floral notes that biodynamic wine-making methods offer. And sure, if you put a glass of bottom-shelf Chardonnay in their left hand and a glass of “the good stuff” in the right, the left hand may well meet the lips more often, but that’s beside the point.\n\nPosing with some of my front-of-house colleagues at a work party in my bar-tending days.\n\nIn another life, I worked at an up-market cocktail lounge where we stocked high-end spirits. One whiskey sold for $7,000[3] a bottle. Pours of another went for over $400 apiece[4]. But the fifteen year old Pappy Van Winkle in the middle of the right-hand side of those bar-shelves was just as good as that $7,000 bottle. Although it was over $200 less per glass than our most expensive pour, most people agreed that it tasted better. This was irrelevant; people paid the extra money because those more expensive whiskeys were close to impossible to get. By tasting them, you were tasting history—a precious liquid that would, sooner or later, be lost to time. To the guests buying these whiskeys, they were not of the utmost quality because they tasted the best. They were of the utmost quality because they met desires beyond the want of a tasty drink: a desire for knowledge, for experience, for a connection with the past. All the same, after a long shift, a bartender I worked with once quipped: “At the end of the night, I’m not looking for nuance,” as he took a shot of bottom-shelf whiskey and cracked open a can of lager.\n\nA group-selfie in the kitchen of the cocktail-lounge.\n\n## On snobbery #\n\nIf we take a closer look at practices that are often dismissed as snobbery, we soon realize that, even if they are weaponized as rituals of the upper class, they nonetheless have working class origins.\n\nComplex lists of flavor notes are a best-effort by those who produce a wine/spirit/coffee/what-have-you to describe the product of their labor to people who haven’t tried it. Sticking one’s nose into a Glencairn glass and breathing in through the mouth will keep alcohol from instantly nose-blinding a bartender-in-training, one who will be smelling hundreds of spirits over the coming weeks. The precise weighing of coffee beans packed into a portafilter provides consistency of flavor from drink to drink throughout a busy service. Even the haughtiest bottle of champagne has a team of _workers_ behind it who, in pursuit of excellence, devise practices that will later be derided as pretensions because of their association with the class of people that can afford the product.\n\nWorking people are the taste-makers. They always have been. They create excellence every day, categorize it, describe it, devise the best ways to discern and appreciate the differences between one product and another. Working people are best positioned to take on these tasks. Their deep familiarity with what they produce is a far-cry from the shallow collection and consumption that has been rendered into a hobby by the affluent.\n\n## Does price matter? #\n\nSo, with all that said, what exactly does _price_ tell us? Obviously it will give us a clue as to how the brand is positioned in the market but, uniquely to incense, pricing can give us a very good clue as to the ingredients used in a stick. Sure, there are differently priced coffee beans, but the sheer breadth of the range of prices for incense ingredients is perhaps paralleled only by natural perfumery.\n\nAn awful lot of coffee beans.\n\nScarce does not begin to describe the dearth of highly fragrant and resinated agarwood in today’s world. Oman’s prized frankincense is so terribly over-exploited that the Omani government has all but taken over the industry in the country, only allowing a small amount of the precious resin to be released each year—at a premium price. Woe betide you if you are caught so much as looking at a sandalwood tree the wrong way in India these days, and as hard as they try, Indonesia and Australia are not yet able to match the quantity or quality of output by India’s sandalwood industry in its heyday. Typically, as the price increases for East Asian incense, so too does the quality and/or quantity of these precious aromatics, and any incongruence here would quickly be noticed by enthusiasts. From pennies per gram for eucalyptus leaf to well beyond the price of gold for top-end agarwood , the range is extreme. While modern lifestyle brands market low-to-mid-range sticks for obscene prices, whole-botanical based East Asian incense from well known incense houses are all but forced align their pricing with the quality of the ingredients. When your incense uses whole-plant materials, the best-grown, freshest, rarest, and most fragrant plants come at a significant price premium due to their rarity and the labor involved in cultivating them.\n\nIngredient processing is arduous—especially for individual incense-makers who don’t have expensive equipment.\n\nFor Indian style incense this situation is a little different. While higher prices might reflect the use of expensive natural oils as opposed to aroma chemicals, unfortunately, and as far as I know, incense using top-end natural materials is all but extinct in Indian brands. I am sure there are small artisans making premium incense in India, but it seems to be mostly smaller western operations such as Jeomra’s Räucherwelt that offer Indian-style incense made with premium natural materials. More-so than in Japanese incense, however, pricing seems to indicate effort for Indian sticks. As opposed to Japan’s extruded sticks, it isn’t at all uncommon to find agarbatti that are hand-rolled. It’s debatable as to what difference this makes to the final fragrance. Some contend that the density of machine-extruded sticks negatively impacts the fragrance. I have also heard that machine extrusion limits the ingredients and composition of the incense dough. Regardless, it is inevitable that, in very cheap commodity products, corners will be cut. Some of these missing corners will surely affect fragrance. And of course, individual artisans will not have the benefit of industrial equipment or processes, and will thus charge more for their incense as it takes significantly more time to make.\n\nIt’s a lot of work to make even just a few grams of incense sticks.\n\nWhat do all of these pricing details say about quality, then? Little.\n\nWhile price can tell us about market positioning, ingredients, and effort, this may not mean much to you or I when it comes to our own ideas of quality. As I look in my incense-drawer I see a $12 box of vanilla Morning Star sticks from Nippon Kodo beside a tube of Brunei agarwood sticks from Yi-Xin Craft Incense: $50 for two grams. I’ve been burning the former since I was 15 years old and first discovered Japanese incense, a vast improvement over the cheap dipped sticks available to me previously. It’s one of the few things capable of soothing sadness or anxiety in me, and I’ve been relying on it for this purpose ever since that first encounter. On the other hand, the Brunei represents an opportunity to sample the work of a small artisan. It’s a chance to experience an extremely rare natural material and understand how the agarwood from Brunei differs from that found in Cambodia. I also very much enjoy the fragrance before bed. I wouldn’t dare say that one of these sticks is better than the other. They are both competently prepared, low on off-notes, and offer a pleasing (to me) aroma. If the prices were exchanged tomorrow, I’d still buy both.\n\n## Have Americans been bamboozled? #\n\nThere seems to be a stereotype that American incense enthusiasts have been bamboozled into preferring quiet Japanese incense over cheaper, more fragrant Indian-style sticks by flashy marketing, product positioning, and fancy packaging. As an incense enthusiast and half-American, I must object on this point. Stick incense in this country is largely associated with stoner culture. It’s seen as a cheap, smoky way to disguise the smell of burning cannabis (which is still illegal in many states). The incense most commonly available is typically bottom-of-the-barrel commodity fare with all of the burning oil, sawdust, and wood glue off-notes that it entails. Better Indian sticks, if available, are very strong for our modern, hermetically-sealed homes. And in the rooms of my small Chicago apartment, the powerful fragrances of Indian incense can quickly begin to feel like suffering for my sensitive nose, even if I might otherwise like them. There is also history at play. According to Michael Cousineau in _The Fragrant Path: A Guide to the Art of Incense,_ Shoyeido introduced Japanese incense to the U.S.A. when the company made its debut in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where the “fragrance of incense wafting from the bazaar filled the Japanese Pavilion.” For the event, Japan had far outspent any other foreign countries in constructing Phoenix Hall, a permanent and stunning example of Japanese architecture modeled on an ancient Buddhist temple. The response to the exhibit was such that Shoyeido developed the incense cone, a shape more likely to survive the long journey at sea, and demand soon became greater than the company’s production capacity.\n\nUnfortunately, the Phoenix Hall / Hooden Palace was lost in a fire. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.\n\nBy describing the rationale for any perceived preference for Japanese incense in the U.S.A., I don’t mean to make any sort of value statement with respect to the incense of either India or Japan. But I will say that, for my needs, quality is largely to be found in Japanese sticks. That said, the Indian incense sent over by Irene has been something of a revelation for me: well-balanced fragrances from well-made sticks that (mostly) speak up without becoming overpowering. I have been enjoying these sticks tremendously and I will almost certainly buy more. Nonetheless, they fulfill a different role than my usual choices. Japanese sticks give me the opportunity to experience genuine high-end botanicals in a way that Indian incense rarely does. And, at least so far, no Indian sticks have come to soothe my soul like those boring, beige little vanilla sticks from Nippon Kodo—although I’m sure they may, given time.\n\n## Is natural better? #\n\nPerhaps, depending on your goals, but not inherently. People have very strong opinions on the topic of natural botanicals versus synthetic aroma chemicals, but here’s the truth: when it comes to health, natural botanicals are no better tested for burning than synthetics. If anything, the opposite is true. I also suspect that most people who get headaches from strong incense are reacting to the strength of fragrance, not its constituent ingredients. After all, many aroma chemicals are identical to the compounds found in nature.\n\nAnother harsh truth is that consumers have no way of knowing whether the incense they burn is natural or not. Very few companies publish ingredients. Fewer publish all of them. There are also a wide variety of fragrances that you’re simply not going to get without synthetics. Violet notes are practically never naturally derived, and whether or not synthetics are used, you’re certainly not going to be getting any real kyara in your $14.99 box of Tennendo Kyara (as good as it is). The fact is that any respectable incense collection is going to contain a mixture of aroma chemicals and natural botanicals, so it’s worth getting over this particular hangup early on.\n\nThat said, if you want to understand what, for instance, Australian sandalwood smells like in incense, you’ll likely reach for a stick that at least prominently features the wood itself. Likewise, faux-and-low-agarwood sticks scratch an entirely different itch than those that make liberal use of high-end wood. They’re both nice for different reasons.\n\nA burning stick of “Kyara” by Tennendo\n\n## Putting it all together #\n\nI recognize that I haven’t offered any concrete answers here, but I hope that I might have been able to provide a little context for the discussion around quality in incense. We know that price indicates, at very least, market positioning and, so long as we’re not dealing with a lifestyle brand, it also gives us a clue as to the ingredients and effort that went into an incense, although to what degree depends on its origin. What represents quality to us depends on our preferences and goals. Are we interested in experiencing and understanding the fragrances of natural materials? Do we want to analyze the work of our favorite Indian perfumer? Are we looking for something that reduces anxiety? Do we simply want to perfume a space as efficiently as possible? Physical, emotional, intellectual, and yes, sometimes social desires will all contribute to our degree of satisfaction and perception of quality, regardless as to whether an incense is predominantly natural or not.\n\n* * *\n\n  1. I would like to point out that Japanese incense companies do close to no marketing at all here in the U.S.A., these days and what does occur is not especially compelling. ↩︎\n\n  2. Which often conflicts with your average consumer’s exposure to highly concentrated synthetic fragrances and the expectations that this exposure implants in them when it comes to incense. ↩︎\n\n  3. For the curious, it was a Pappy 17 with the wax-dipped bottle. ↩︎\n\n  4. This was years ago; I dread to think what they’d go for now. ↩︎\n\n\n",
  "title": "Incense: Thoughts on Quality, Price, and Snobbery",
  "updatedAt": "2026-01-31T00:00:00.000Z"
}