---
title: "Incense: Thoughts on Quality, Price, and Snobbery"
description: "Some thoughts on how we think about quality, how incense pricing relates to it, snobbery, and my service-industry past."
date: 2026-01-31
tags:
  - Incense
synopsis: "Some thoughts on how we think about quality, how incense pricing relates to it, snobbery, and my service-industry past."
imageURL: /img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/tennendo-kyara-incense-stick-macro-shot.webp
imageAlt: "A macro shot of a burning stick of incense with shallow depth of field."
mastodon_id: "115993146633109522"
---
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](https://kikohincense.com/collections/kyara-incense/products/gyokushodo-en-no-sho)
, 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipropylene_glycol) 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.

[![Three pieces of wood. On top is a small, thick piece, almost entirely dark brown with resin. Beneath is a thin agarwood "skin," resinated side up, showing streaks of dark resin on lighter colored wood. On the bottom is a skin with the resinous side down, showing the large amount of unresinated wood in these skins.](/img/flora_botanical_incense_abundance_oud/agarwood_skins_vs_white_kinam_bead_waste.webp "A piece of cultivated white kinam bead waste atop two lower quality cultivated “skins.”")](/img/flora_botanical_incense_abundance_oud/agarwood_skins_vs_white_kinam_bead_waste.webp)

## What is quality, anyway?

In 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.

It'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.

I 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.

[![A poor quality photo of me and four of my cocktail-bar colleagues sitting on a couch posing for a photo. Everyone is dressed nicely and I am holding some sort of cocktail.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/FOH-Work-Event.jpg "Posing with some of my front-of-house colleagues at a work party in my bar-tending days.")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/FOH-Work-Event.jpg)

In 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.

[![A poor quality photo of me and five of my colleagues in a commercial kitchen. Behind us is a storage area with stacks of cambro containers.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/In-The-Kitchen.jpg "A group-selfie in the kitchen of the cocktail-lounge.")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/In-The-Kitchen.jpg)

## On snobbery

If 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.

Complex 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.

Working 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.

## Does price matter?

So, 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.

[![Me, standing in a creased apron in front of a rack containing pallets of green coffee beans in beige sacks.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/a-lot-of-coffee-beans.JPG "An awful lot of coffee beans.")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/a-lot-of-coffee-beans.JPG)

Scarce 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](https://web.archive.org/web/20250906194216/https://scents-of-earth.com/eucalyptus-leaf-eucalyptus-globulus-india/)
to well beyond the price of gold for
[top-end agarwood](https://web.archive.org/web/20250428184307/https://www.ensaroud.com/product/white-kinam/)
, 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.

[![Ground sage leaves in the process of slowly being passed through a sieve. A spoon is in the sieve, and a small area of very fine powder is visible beneath the sieve.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/sifting-ground-sage-for-incense-sticks_copy.webp "Ingredient processing is arduous—especially for individual incense-makers who don't have expensive equipment.")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/sifting-ground-sage-for-incense-sticks_copy.webp)

For 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](https://raeucherwelt.de/) 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.

[![A close-up of a small pile of short and thin extruded incense sticks next to a ruler and a stainless steel extruder. Everything is on top of a drying mesh.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/extruded-incense-sticks.webp "It's a lot of work to make even just a few grams of incense sticks.")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/extruded-incense-sticks.webp)

What do all of these pricing details say about quality, then? Little.

While 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.

## Have Americans been bamboozled?

There 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.

[![A stereograph print showing part of the Phoenix Hall / Hooden Palace in 1893.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/hooden-phoenix-hall.webp "Unfortunately, the Phoenix Hall / Hooden Palace was lost in a fire. [Image courtesy of the Library of Congress](https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/stereo.1s46562/).")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/hooden-phoenix-hall.webp)

By 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](https://blog.rauchfahne.de/en/) 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.

## Is natural better?

Perhaps, 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.

Another 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](https://kikohincense.com/products/tennendo-kyara-incense) (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.

That 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.

[![A macro shot of a burning stick of incense with shallow depth of field.](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/tennendo-kyara-incense-stick-macro-shot.webp "A burning stick of “Kyara” by Tennendo")](/img/thoughts-on-incense-quality-price-and-snobbery/tennendo-kyara-incense-stick-macro-shot.webp)

## Putting it all together

I 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.

[^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](https://www.instagram.com/shoyeido_incense_usa/).

[^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.

[^3]: For the curious, it was a Pappy 17 with the wax-dipped bottle.

[^4]: This was years ago; I dread to think what they'd go for now.