---
title: "Grand Dame: A Breakthrough Incense Blend?"
description: "An attempt at a lavender incense stick goes remarkably well thanks to an unusual technique."
date: 2024-07-28
tags:
  - Incense
  - Incense Making
synopsis: "An attempt at a lavender incense stick goes remarkably well thanks to an unusual technique."
imageURL: /img/sending-incense-samples.webp
imageAlt: An uncapped fountain pen on top of a pretty, gold-foiled pad of paper beside some envelopes with stamps featuring coffee drinks on them.
mastodon_id: "112867886475498806"
---
I wrote two letters today, sealing each into a cotton envelope alongside a colorful cardboard straw, taped at both ends, containing two minuscule sticks of incense. I'm very excited about what's in those straws: incense sticks resulting from a blend I've dubbed *Grand Dame.*

---
*A quick note:
You can [see everything I've written on incense here,](../../tags/incense/) or [subscribe to just incense posts via RSS.](../../feeds/incense.xml)*

*Correction: When this article was first published, I wrongly attributed the suggestion that Yi-Xin's "Heart of Lavender" isn't likely to use lavender essential oil to Irene of [rauchfahne.de](https://blog.rauchfahne.de/en/) who has since let me know that it wasn't her who suggested this.*

---

[![An uncapped fountain pen on top of a pretty, gold-foiled pad of paper beside some envelopes with stamps featuring coffee drinks on them.](/img/sending-incense-samples.webp "If you're going to snail-mail, you might as well do it in style.")](/img/sending-incense-samples.webp)

These sticks are interesting for a couple of reasons. First, they make use of ambrette seeds, which are mentioned in places such as [incensemaking.com,](https://incensemaking.com/aromatics/musk-seeds/) but there's precious little information available about people *actually using them* in incense. The sticks also involve an experimental technique that I used to try to achieve a lavender fragrance similar to that in Yi-Xin's *Heart of Lavender.*

## Ambrette
Ambrette seeds, or musk seeds, are used in perfumery as a natural alternative to animal musk. Far be it from me to deprive an innocent creature of any of its organs, no matter how fragrant, I have been curious about this ingredient for some time as a way to imbue incense with a measure of animalic depth and complexity.

One of the factors that makes traditional incense making so difficult is that most plants reek to high heaven when burned unless you very precisely control the ratio of the ingredient and the temperature at which it burns. Knowing that tonka beans are notorious for smelling less than rosy when used in too high a concentration, I treated the ambrette seeds with a similar trepidation. Through experimentation, I've found that ambrette seeds make their presence well known at as little as two percent of a total blend.

Ambrette seed really does need to be a part of a blend. Upon lighting, it's one of the first ingredients you'll notice, and as a stick of *Grand Dame* was burning while I wore a mask during a visit to Dave of [The World Makes Scents](https://theworldmakesscents.com/) in his workshop (a great time that I plan to write about soon - thanks Dave!), the ambrette was one of the few notes that made it through the tight fibers of a KN95. In isolation, the burning musk seeds aren't pretty, but I really think they add something special to the blend as a whole.

## The Experiment
I've been a bit obsessed with Yi-Xin's [*Heart of Lavender*](https://craft-incense.com/products/lavenwood) since I first tried it. You see, creating floral incense is notoriously difficult; burning flowers rarely produce a fragrance that's even remotely pleasant, and when they do, it's still tricky to get the blend right. As Ken of Yi-Xin wrote on the *Heart of Lavender* product page:

>Blending lavender flowers into incense basically makes the scent quite herbaceous and sharp.  So it took a lot of tweaking and some special techniques to get correct.

He also hints at one of these special techniques:

>Firstly, the base ingredient is a specially processed Stanford Cedar material that integrated lavender in a very unique way

Whatever Ken is doing to those ingredients, it produces a beautiful lavender stick which somehow circumvents the sharpness he describes altogether. It's practically *juicy* — floral, but fruity and tart like a plum. As an incense maker, how you could know that this is possible and *not* try to do it is beyond me, so I came up with an idea and tested my hypothesis in *Grand Dame.* The best guess I could muster as to how he'd managed to avoid that familiar scent of burning plant material that is usually part and parcel of, well, burning plant material, was that he must have either omitted it entirely or significantly reduced the quantity used. If I recall, someone mentioned to me at one point that *Heart of Lavender* didn't strike them as containing any significant quantity of essential oil, and I had forgotten that hydrosols exist, which left me with the idea that perhaps Ken had used a tincture.

I started out by soaking whole dried lavender flowers in [Pisco,](https://catanpisco.com/) which smelled incredible. I soon did a little reading on tinctures, however, and found that I was going about it all wrong. The proof of the Pisco and the ratio of flowers to Pisco were both too low, and I'd need to wait several weeks to see how my tincture had turned out in any case. At this point, I bought an ounce of lavender tincture to experiment with. I combined the entire bottle with six grams of stunning powdered [Juniperus Virginiana from The World Makes Scents;](https://theworldmakesscents.com/products/premium-super-fine-red-cedar-powder-juniperus-virginiana) after stirring well and letting the mixture sit for twenty-four hours, I removed the lid from the jar and allowed the liquid to evaporate. The result of a quick burn test was thrilling: the trail of cedar produced the beautiful, fruity lavender fragrance that I'd hoped for.

Now that I had some lavender fragranced wood, I decided to make some sticks from it. To the cedar, I added benzoin for sweetness and for its fixative properties, acacia gum to help modulate burn temperature and to strengthen the sticks, cinnamon, borneol, a small amount of powdered lavender, the ambrette seed, and guar gum to bind. In my opinion, the sticks turned out very well.

Weeks later, I reflected on the original purpose of my tincture experiment while taking a look at the last of my *Heart of Lavender* sticks from Yi-Xin. As I did, I realised something: these sticks are *dark.* There had to be a significant amount of lavender flowers in them.

[![A dark stick of "Heart of Lavender" seen through a printer's loupe.](/img/heart-of-lavender.webp "There's no way this doesn't contain a significant amount of lavender flowers.")](/img/heart-of-lavender.webp)

Here is a comparison between *Grand Dame* and *Heart of Lavender*:


[![The two sticks seen through a printer's loupe. Mine is significantly lighter in color.](/img/incense-stick-comparison.webp "Left: Grand Dame; Right: Heart of Lavender. Quite a difference. ")](/img/incense-stick-comparison.webp)

With that, while it produces a lovely stick, I think my tincture idea is out of the window. Knowing that Ken was taught by [Kyarazen,](https://www.kyarazen.com/) who writes on traditional Chinese incense techniques as does his student [Dr. Incense,](https://dr-incense.com/) I wonder whether the cedar and lavender might have been processed by [steaming](https://dr-incense.com/blogs/dr-incense-blog/traditional-processing-of-aloeswood) them together. At any rate, despite my disappointment at failing to discover how Ken of Yi-Xin made his lavender incense so good, I did manage to find a way of achieving a similar result, and I'm keen to hear what some of my fellow incense-heads think providing those samples arrive in good condition. It continues to be an interesting line of enquiry as tinctures are expensive, even when you make them yourself, so I'd be grateful to discover a more frugal alternative. I've also started some more tinctures to play with, one with osmanthus and another using jasmine. I'll let you know how those work out.
