Goloka – Premium Line – Divine

Bought at Spiru.de on special offer for €0.89. Usually, they cost €1.69 at that shop. It’s a 15g pack with approx. 12 sticks, sometimes more.

I had some difficulties with Divine at the beginning. If the name doesn’t give you any clues as to what smell to expect, you can read a lot into it. And so my nose initially decided to interpret the scent as sandalwood; probably from the convention “Indian incense sticks = sandalwood”. But something was strange, it didn’t quite fit. I then browsed around a bit and read the review on Incense in The Wind. “Cedar!? Never!” I thought.
After reading this, I sat down, sniffed different cedar chips, and borrowed Himalayan cedar essential oil from my mother’s collection to compare. “Fuck yeah: cedar!” – I felt a little embarrassed.
It really took until the third or fourth stick for my brain to fully get used to the idea. However, to me, they still smell much more like cedarwood oil than the wood itself. Quite a sweet wood smell, warm and round, not an actual wood smoke smell.
By the way, the raw smell reminds me of yarrow flowers, which made the whole thing even a little weirder. If you don’t know yarrow, it has a tart, herbaceous smell, almost a bit soapy, with a hint of honey sweetness.

I can imagine that these incense sticks can create a very cosy atmosphere in the right space. They don’t smell bad to me, but they don’t really fit in my place. I find them a bit boring overall, but to just letting them burn in the background, they are too strong for my small rooms as well, especially in winter.
Rating: 2.7 – But recommended to all cedar fans who find Sandalwood boring at times. 😉