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Incense Review: Abundance / Oud by Flora Botanical Incense	Reviewing Abundance / Oud from Flora Botanical Incense and talking about agarwood in combustible incense.	2025-12-19	Incense Incense Review	Reviewing Abundance / Oud from Flora Botanical Incense and talking about agarwood in combustible incense.	/img/flora_botanical_incense_abundance_oud/flora_botanical_incense_abundance_oud_preview_copy.webp	A closeup of incense packaging, reading: Flora Botanical Incense, Pure and Natural, Plant based.	115748680674563634

Flora Botanical Incense is the brainchild of Alyssa Severeid, who is also behind the Incense Explorer podcast¹ . I'd been keen to try her sticks for some time, but I admit the price tag kept me at bay until a recent sale. Not long after ordering I was delighted to receive a rather pretty compostable mailer along with the usual contingent of bills and junk mail. The packaging of the sticks is rather clever: a cardstock sleeve wraps around an oblong chunk of cork with a shallow divot removed to contain the sticks. The cork component doubles as a burner, which is nice.

The format and premium pricing of these sticks really intrigued me; in my part of the world, almost all high end sticks on the market are small and coreless, in the style of Chinese or Japanese incense. Virtually everything you'll find on a bamboo splint here is very much on the low end² . The price point is directly addressed on the brand's Instagram page , which notes a few key factors, boiling down to the use of natural, responsibly sourced and whole-botanical ingredients. A former print broker, I suspect the packaging has something to do with it too. As an incense-maker, I am also well aware of the fact that in order to get any kind of pleasant fragrance from whole-botanical ingredients, their quality has to be very high—ergo their price tends to be also. This is especially true of agarwood.

The sticks are very neatly made; they appear to consist of a solid, even, light-brown masala, machine extruded to coat a rather hefty bamboo splint. Each stick is roughly eleven inches (27.8cm) long with a burnable length of seven and a half inches (19cm). There is little to no fragrance on the unlit stick. This aligns with the ingredients listed on the packaging: cultivated agarwood powder (Aquilaria crassna); litsea powder; bamboo stick. Clearly, these are not Japanese style "sweet" agarwood sticks in which sandalwood, camphor, and spices bolster a small amount of agarwood, but these sticks also do not appear to be using the sort of high-end woods that you often find in a strictly-agarwood stick, which can be so rich with resin that they emit fragrance at room temperature.

Lighting up a stick of Oud from Flora Botanical Incense put a smile on my face as I was met with the distinctive aroma of agarwood. It's very obviously a natural fragrance, which I appreciate—the effort that goes into making any whole botanical incense is not lost on me. As the stick burns, however, the characteristic harshness of low-end agarwood creeps in. I don't mean that as a knock; this acrid note is found anywhere less than top-shelf agarwood is used—you'll also find it in Yi-Xin's Everyday Aloes and Kyara Zen's Mystery of the Goose Pear. Last night I thought I detected a hint in Yamadamatsu's Suifu (although, if so, it was cleverly obscured with camphor). It just happens to be a note that I don't particularly like. The balance between yin and yang here isn't too bad, however; I am still able to enjoy the sticks. The overall fragrance is gentle enough not to be bothersome, but has no trouble filling the room. It lingers quietly after the burn, but disappears before too long.

Unless you are working with very high grades of agarwood³ you will typically see ambergris-like striations in the wood between the resin and white wood fibers. Unlike the redolent heartwood of the sandal tree, these white fibers contain little oil, and thus, little fragrance. This is all very well when you are putting a cultivated "skin" on the heater to enjoy at 180°c, but when you grind up the wood whole and put it into a stick of combustible incense, those white fibers emit a harsh, acrid smell that evokes burning paper and marmite.

This has largely prevented me from using agarwood in my work—I find affordable agarwood acrid and, well, just take a look at the price of the nice stuff . But when it comes to buying incense for my own enjoyment, I don't mind spending a bit of money. I really enjoy artisanal single-origin agarwood sticks, so rich with resin (and charcoal to keep all that resin burning) that the sticks are black. There's something so moreish about that nigh-indescribable, sticky, room-filling fragrance that lingers for hours. I guess what I'm trying to say is that at $68 for 25 sticks, for me, the value is just not there in Flora Botanical's Oud sticks. At this price point, I'm really looking for quality over quantity: I'd be much happier with a small bundle of skinny and redolent coreless sticks—all resin with the few decigrams of binder and charcoal necessary to keep them solid and burning. These days, this is well achievable with cultivated woods.

I'm not unimpressed with these sticks, though. The bamboo stick and the wider diameter part and parcel of this format really can fight against you in your effort to produce a good fragrance, but the sticks seem well made and I am absolutely going to work my way through the box. If you enjoy the harsher side of less resinated agarwood, and you're not looking for a composition, you really can't go wrong here. As for me: am I likely to buy another box? No. But would I complain if my partner lit a stick in the living room? Absolutely not.

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1. Alyssa also happens to be part of an incense-makers chat group that I am a member of, but rest assured, I intend to be impartial in my review of her work all the same. ↩︎

2. Of course, it may just be that I simply don't know where to find the good stuff. ↩︎

3. Republished because Instagram was sending anyone who clicked the link to a totally random reel for some reason. ↩︎