Tina Sams - Making Your Own Incense

Tina Sams & Maryanne Schwartz

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Edited by Arden Moore

Cover illustration by Alison Kolesar Cover design by Carol J. Jessop (Black Trout Design)

Text illustrations by Laura Tedeschi, except pages 2, 17, 19, 21, 22, and 23 by Alison Kolesar

Text production by Nancy Ringer

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Incense evokes a sense of luxury, of being in an exotic place where spices and aromas lift our spirits. The popularity of aromatherapy has led to a growing interest in incense as a means to make our homes more welcoming, more inviting, more pleasant. Unfortunately, commercial incenses rarely contain true essential oils or resins. Making your own incense can ensure that youre burning what you want!

Incense has been burned for thousands of years. Remember the wonderful tale of the Three Wise Men bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh to baby Jesus? These gifts of the Magi were incenses highly valued for their fragrances. To this day, frankincense and myrrh are the most well-known resins used as incense.

In many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, incense mixtures containing frankincense and myrrh are still burned during sacred rituals.

Whats a Resin?

A resin is derived from the sap of plants. Once processed, it resembles tiny tan or brown pebbles. Both frankincense and myrrh are resins; frankincense comes from the Boswellia carteri plant, native to Ethiopia, and myrrh comes from the Commiphora myrrha plant, which grows throughout northern Africa.

Many people associate incense with religious rituals or spirituality, and indeed, many religions use fragrant smoke in their rites and ceremonies. The smoke is said to sanctify, and many believe that it carries messages to the heavens. In addition, the smoke from smoldering incense is said to clear the air for higher thinking, as might be needed for meditation.

During the Renaissance scents were used freely to disguise body odors because bathing was deemed unsafe. Hygiene at the time was at an all-time low as a previously rural population shifted to villages and cities that had poor or no sanitation provisions; many people used incense in their homes because they thought it would protect them against the plague and other diseases. As it turns out, this theory may have had some validity many of the incense herbs, including thyme and lemongrass, have since been proved to contain healing and antiseptic properties.

In our homes, incense has been burned as a way both to mask unpleasant smells and to create an inviting, warm atmosphere. Long before the invention of aerosol cans, incense was a natural air freshener. Our grandmother often burned balsam incense cones in a little smoking man burner or a Swiss chalet that released smoke through its chimney. As children, they fascinated us!

Throughout this booklet, we will refer to the aromatherapy benefits of the plants and other materials used to make incense. Every plant material contains essential oils some incense recipes call for the essential oil itself, which is expressed from the plant through a special process and can be purchased at most herb shops. When we burn incense, molecules of these essential oils are released into the air. There they find their way through our olfactory system and through the pores in our skin to our brain, where they effect chemical interactions that can change our mood, evoke memories of times past, and more. These aromas can help us to relax or to wake up; they can raise our spirits or even put us into romantic moods! In fact, some essential oils have been proven to hold many healing properties; thyme, for example, was used to disinfect hospitals and sickrooms until the discovery of modern antibiotics.

We discovered the joys of burning real incense several years ago when we were The Herb Ladies at a Renaissance Faire in Pennsylvania. It seemed fitting to use the scent of burning resins to lure throngs of visitors to our little herb shop. The resins and herbs we burned seemed to help lift our spirits as well as the spirits of those entering the shop.

We sold resins by the ounce and kept a bag filled with the bits left over after dividing up pounds. Inside our bag were chunks of frankincense and myrrh along with dragons blood, benzoin, copal, sandalwood and other woods, and herbs and spices. We burned a charcoal block and sprinkled our blend on it from time to time. People often asked us what we were burning. We couldnt answer them honestly because it was always just a wonderful mishmash of whatever had landed in our bag at that time.

Types of Incense

As you may have guessed, there are different types of incense. Heres the lineup:

Smudge

Loose noncombustibles

Loose combustibles

Combustible cones and sticks

The combustible and noncombustible labels simply tell you whether or not the incense mixture contains a combustible ingredient that is, whether the incense will burn on its own if it is lit with a match or whether you need to combine it with something else that burns readily, like charcoal, in order for it to ignite.

Burning a combination like this is easy outdoors, where the aromas dissipate into wonderful clouds. Inside, however, its a different matter. When we attempted to burn our blend inside a closed house, the billows of fragrance no longer dissipated; instead, they filled the rooms with heavy, resinous smoke. We were disappointed. How could we reproduce that scent inside without the smoke overcoming us?

We searched for incense sticks or cones that smelled the same as the resins we had burned. Occasionally we found commercial incense made with the actual resins, but they were quite expensive. Other times, we found products labeled FRANKINCENSE or DRAGONS BLOOD, but it was obvious that they had been created by people who had never smelled the real thing. To us, they smelled suspiciously like cinnamon or synthetics.