u/Woctor_Datsun

As a relative newcomer to serious incense burning, I've had to learn a lot. Given the amount of collective knowledge possessed by people in this sub, I thought it would be useful to start a thread to tap into that knowledge.

Please share any non-obvious tips, tricks, or observations related to incense burning that you think might help others. I'll start off with a few of my own:

• People often speak of frankincense, myrrh, copal, etc as if they were single substances. In fact, there is tremendous variety in each of those categories. Frankincense, for instance, comes from 20-25 different species and the differences in scent can be striking. For instance, I have some royal green hojari that blows me away. If I walked into a room where it was being burned, I would instantly recognize it. Frankincense isn't just frankincense.

• Heating, instead of burning, is often preferable. I did an OP on that recently, so I won't repeat myself here.

• One of the nice things about burning on charcoal is that you get a burst of scent right away when you put the incense on the charcoal puck. Other forms of incense don't give you that burst, but if you're burning coreless incense and you want more scent more quickly, simply break the stick into more than one piece and light the pieces simultaneously.

• The standard method of lighting incense is to apply heat, get a flame going, and then blow it out. I was surprised to find that some of my Japanese varieties are difficult or impossible to light this way, even with a butane torch lighter. I can get the glowing ember, and the stick will burn normally thereafter, but I never get the flame. The first time I encountered this, I thought my batch of incense might be defective. I have since learned that this is a common occurrence with low-smoke or smokeless varieties and is to be expected.

• I initially associated tealight burners with resins and blends, and that's the way they are normally used, but you can also put stick and cone incense in them. In the case of coreless Japanese incense, you can break the stick into little pieces and put them in the burner cup. With bamboo core incense, you can scrape the incense off the stick and put it in the cup. With cones, you can just pulverize them and put the granules in the cup. It takes more effort to burn incense this way, and often I don't bother with it and just burn the sticks as is, but heating can make the incense last longer and produce an interestingly different scent profile.

• Some varieties of Japanese incense include a small holder in the box. Nippon Kodo, for instance, includes small square ceramic holders in their Morningstar boxes. I use those holders, but they're small and have a tendency to tip over when I'm handling the incense. To counteract that tendency, I'll take several of those holders and superglue them together, thus creating a larger, more stable base. This also allows me to to burn multiple sticks at once (see item above) or set up my session ahead of time and just light each stick when the previous one is finished.

• With coreless incense, the stick will burn down its length to the holder but then stop, leaving a short stub inside the holder. The stubs are hard to light, so at first I was just tossing them. No big deal because they're so small, but now I save them. When I'm doing a tealight session and the resin is petering out, I'll sometimes toss my accumulated stubs into the cup and get a nice burst of scent. The combination of the different stub varieties plus the scent of the resin can be very interesting, and it's a way to make use of those stubs instead of just pitching them.

• One of the annoyances of the small ceramic holders is that the stubs sometimes get stuck in them and it can be hard to get them out to make room for the next stick. To get around this, I use a power drill to make the holes slightly larger and now the stubs just fall out when I lift the holders. If you try this, one word of caution: be careful when drilling because the ceramic holders can break if you're too rough with them.

Those are all the ones I can think of right now, but I look forward to hearing your own tips, tricks and observations.

Walking through our local Target yesterday, I was hit by the awful stench of the air freshener section (Febreze, Glade, Renuzit, etc.) I picked up and smelled a few and thought "People actually want this in their houses?" And don't get me started on those execrable little pine tree-shaped air fresheners that people hang from their rearview mirrors.

It's a shame that incense use isn't more common here. If I light a stick of Fred Soll's desert patchouli in the morning, it burns for almost four hours. The lovely smell permeates the house and lingers for hours afterward. Compare that to an olfactory assault from a supermarket air freshener.