One Last Chance for Wild Berry: Reviewing Fizzy Pop Incense Powder

Some time ago, I reviewed a variety of Wild Berry incense sticks and cones. If you don’t know how that went, here’s an idea:

It’s the kind of smell that makes you feel that your lifespan is being reduced… off-notes are tremendous… beginning to feel as though I’ve french-inhaled my way through a pack of menthol Newports.

I didn’t think I’d wind up returning to the brand, but I figured I’d give them one last chance before I completely wrote it off. If you haunt /r/incense as much I do, you’ll know that Fizzy Pop is rated highly by Wild Berry fans. Since my last experience with Wild Berry’s incense, I’ve felt that it may have been a bit of an oversight not to try Fizzy Pop. I was also curious about the company’s incense powder offering. Not only is it unusual for a western incense brand to offer powder, but in my experience powders don’t tend to contain all of the off-notes you might imagine to be supplied by bamboo sticks and binders. It’s much easier to make a powder that doesn’t stink to the heavens than it is a stick. With that thought, my mind was made up. I simply hadn’t been fair to Wild Berry until I’d tried the powder variant of their fan favorite.

Ten Trumpland fun-bucks, plus shipping, will net you a jar containing 38 grams of shockingly blue incense powder—approximately twelve hours of burn time according to the side of the jar. I sure hope I like this stuff. The fragrance upon opening the jar is a lot of fun. It’s strong, smelling distinctly like a concentrated lemon-lime soda syrup, or a fizzy lemon-lime candy. It’s uncanny; a super bright, almost powdery, white-musk / laundry detergent note offers a real sensation of effervescence. There are going to be a lot of people who find the unburned fragrance of this stuff sickly, but I happen to love candy and don’t mind smells in this category. I don’t necessarily want my apartment fragranced of it, but it’s fun to smell.

Just look at the color of this stuff!

I must admit that it felt wrong loading up a stencil with this lightning-blue powder in my Chinese censer. The test-blends I use this thing to burn might not always be great, but they are made of real aromatic woods, resins, and other botanicals. The powder texture was pretty perfect, however, and it was easy enough to make a neat incense seal.

Lighting the inauspicious cloud.

Upon lighting, a long, angry red ember took hold, quickly working its way down the electric blue trail and turning it into a spookily dark black ash. The fragrance that emerged immediately alerted me to the fact that this experiment was a grave mistake. While scrambling to get away without knocking over my camera, I scribbled onto an upside-down notepad:

fishy , burning laundry-detergent. metallic. Like smelled like in the ashes of incense. Diabolical. maybe the faintest hint of sprite.

As I paced the living room, trying to come to terms with what I was experiencing, I realized that I was going to have to sit back down next to the burning incense to take more pictures. Behind the camera the fishy smoke followed me, flying straight at my face like I’d offended it. I covered my mouth with my shirt; it did little good. Even the ember looked like it had it in for me.

That mean glow frightens me. See more pictures in the gallery.

In the aftermath of this ordeal, It occurred to me that I may not have managed to write in sufficient detail to constitute a review. I thought about burning another trail to analyze the incense more closely, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

My “notes.”

But, really, what more can I say? In my struggle to record the many emotions and sensations I was experiencing, I don’t know that I could do much better than “ Diabolical ” at the time, and I don’t know that I can do better now. Yes, I think I’m done with Wild Berry for good at this point. After two, frankly, harrowing experiences with the brand, I don’t even know that I can muster the courage to try the “Mystic Meadow” sample sticks they’ve sent me. Not to put too fine a point on it, but how a company can develop, approve, and sell an incense powder that smells so strikingly, aggressively, offensively bad is truly beyond me.