Incense is sold by mood: cleansing, focus, love, protection. Those charts are fine as far as they go, but they describe the label rather than the object. There are three genuinely different things sold as incense, they are made in completely different ways, and the difference is more useful to you than any correspondence table.
1. Dipped sticks, which is most of what is sold
A blank stick — usually bamboo coated in unscented charcoal or sawdust paste — is dipped or soaked in synthetic fragrance oil, then dried. Nothing aromatic is built into the body of the stick. All the scent sits on the surface, in an oil that was chosen to be cheap and strong.
You can spot them: uniformly black or grey coating, a very intense smell in the packet, and a sharpness in the smoke once lit. If a shop is selling forty scents in identical-looking sticks, they are dipped blanks from one supplier.
This is the incense that gives people headaches, and it is why some people believe they "cannot burn incense". They can. They have been burning perfumed sawdust.
2. Masala sticks, where the ingredients are in the stick
Masala means mixture. Ground herbs, resins, woods, gums and sometimes honey are made into a paste and rolled by hand onto the stick, so the aromatic material is the body of the thing rather than a coating on it. They look duller and more irregular. They smell quieter in the packet and better when lit, and they burn a little unevenly because a hand-rolled stick is not a machine-made one.
Nag champa is the famous example. Halmaddi, the resin that gives it that slightly damp, plasticky sweetness, is tapped from the Ailanthus tree and has become scarce and expensive, which is why old-timers say it does not smell the way it used to. They are right.
3. Loose resin on charcoal, which is the oldest way
Frankincense, myrrh, copal, benzoin — hardened tree sap, burned as granules on a charcoal disc in a heatproof bowl. No stick, no binder, no fragrance oil. Just the resin.
It is more effort: you light the disc, wait for it to ash over, then add a few grains. It also produces far more smoke than a stick, so it wants a bigger room or an open window. In return you get the actual smell of the material, which in the case of good frankincense is nothing like the "frankincense" stick from the same shop.
This is the form that every ancient reference to incense is describing. Sticks are a much later, largely South and East Asian development.
The bit nobody puts on the packet
Burning anything indoors produces fine particulates, and incense produces a lot of them — more per hour than a cigarette, in several published measurements. That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to open a window, burn one stick rather than three, and not sleep in a closed room with something smouldering.
We would rather tell you that than sell you a chart.
Choosing, practically
- You want the room to smell of one clear thing: masala sticks.
- You want the real material, and you have a window: loose resin on charcoal.
- You get headaches from incense: you have probably only met dipped sticks. Try a resin before giving up on the whole category.