Monsoon Incense – Agarwood

This pack was part of a generous selection of samples sent to me by Eugene Andrushchenko, owner of the brands Bhagwan and Monsoon Incense, in mid-2024.
At that time, the brand was still called Good Incense.

A 15g pack contains approximately 8 sticks and costs €2.95; €0.37 per stick. They’re 9″ (approx. 23cm) long and burn for 40-45 minutes.

Agarwood remind me primarily of tart aftershave and tart soap. Especially the raw scent shows an alcohol-like volatility which I find rather unpleasant.

The fragrance of the burning sticks is woody, but I can’t find anything that I could identify as agarwood. There’s a dark, tart component; which contributes the soapiness for me. In a certain way, the smell of Agarwood reminds me of Ayurvedic – Chakra, which I described as ‘pseudo-oudhy’.

Sometimes I pick up a hint of balsamic softness in the smell, but this isn’t accompanied by any sweetness. Even the after-smell retains a certain volatile and slightly soapy character.

Agarwood absolutely aren’t my thing. I’ll give away some of the remaining samples; let’s see what others think about them.

Note

To a certain extent, I can understand the comparison with bakhoor that Eugene draws in his description, but I find the wording a bit confusing. It sounds as if he’s saying that agarwood is also known as bakhoor.
‘Bakhoor’ comes from the Arabic word بَخُور (baḵūr), which simply means ‘incense’. If you go into an Oriental grocery shop, and ask for ‘bakhoor’, they might well offer you some random incense sticks.
It’s a bit like with many Germans calling all sorts of incense ‘Weihrauch’ (literally translating to ‘sacred smoke’) despite it actually meaning frankincense. So it can totally happen that someone calls agarwood ‘bakhoor’, meaning it in the sense of ‘incense’, but the terms agarwood and bakhoor aren’t synonyms by any means.

On the world market, bakhoor generally means specific types of traditional Arabic incense. Wiktionary defines bakhoor as “incense in the form of scented chips or blocks, used in Arab countries”.
These chips are often (but not always) agarwood that often already has been distilled. These splinters are soaked in fragrant oils. A form of sugar serves as a fixative or perhaps also for consistency in the blends; additionally, resins or other incense materials can be part of a bakhoor recipe.