Ispalla – Palo Santo & Jasmine INSPIRATION / JOY
I got these incense sticks directly from Ispalla Incense out of Peru, you can find the backstory in this article.
My review explicitly refers to this new version, in a new packaging design. I can’t say how they differ from the old ones.
The new version with the revised recipe has now found its way onto the German market; Indiaroma sells it for €3.10.
Palo Santo & Jasmin INSPIRATION is the name of the stick version of this fragrance. Further down in this article you will find JOY, an incense log version of this fragrance.
The burning time of the incense sticks is approx. 50 minutes. One pack contains 10 pieces.
Ingredients: Bamboo sticks, palo santo powder, palo santo resin, powdered jasmine flowers, pure jasmine essential oil, distilled water.
Palo santo also seems to combine well with jasmine. However, INSPIRATION is a bit too strong for my taste, at least inside the house. On the balcony, it dilutes enough to be pleasant and interesting.
I was a little surprised to see jasmine flowers in the list of ingredients. I have found that even when very high-quality jasmine flowers are burned as incense, there is hardly any scent left and instead the smell comes off strangely foody, it has a roasty aroma with a tendency to smell burnt. Maybe it’s just a matter of finding the right ratio. In the fresh air, I sometimes think I can smell a hint of said aroma, but it blends in with the woody aspect of palo santo.
The scent of the jasmine oil contained is very typical of what I know as jasmine from various products: a very sweet, heady and lush floral scent that can sometimes be intrusive or even increases in intensity until it has a pungent smell that many people tend to describe as cat piss. For me, INSPIRATION remains just below this threshold.
One box of JOY contains 8 “tablets”- that’s the term Ispalla uses for the small cuboids. More common is “incense log”. It is a form of incense that seems to be found mainly from a few brands in America. They are usually thick, cylindrical or angular pressed pieces made from coarsely ground wood.
JOY is a bit too intense for me, even outside. Even though there is no mention of any essential oil among the ingredients on the packaging, the smell seems more perfumed to me than the sticks. If I don’t place them at least 2 meters away from me, I find the smell overbearing.
Regarding both variants, I want to mention that my friend Max didn’t find them too strong. Overall, he seems to perceive the smell of jasmine differently than I do. So, I think that INSPIRATION and JOY will make people disagree as well.