Sonnentag – Natural Scents – Kashmir

I discovered the Sonnentag brand by chance and ordered directly from their shop. The regular price is €2.70, I bought Kashmir on special offer for €2.20. A pack contains 10g, which in the case of Kashmir were 10 incense sticks. That makes an approximate unit price of 27ct. A burning time is not specified.

I had a short, friendly email contact with Sonnentag and learned that the manufacturing company in India from which they had previously got their incense from unfortunately no longer exists. So the incense sticks that have been produced in India will disappear from their range as soon as the current stock is sold out, and Kashmir is one of them.

I originally wrote to Sonnentag in the hope of learning more about the ingredients listed for Kashmir: “Rosin, Ralam, Jaggery (Indian resins)”. Unfortunately, they couldn’t help me any further.
Jaggery is a common term in India for raw sugar, which can be either palm sugar or cane sugar. I am already familiar with its use in incense sticks from the Mother’s brand, they use jaggery as a substitute for honey in the vegan version of their Nagchampa line. Rosin is usually an umbrella term for the substance that remains after distilling the essential oil contained in a resin. Colophony, for example, is the rosin of pine resin, At least in German [Kolophonium]. In English, colophony is used as a synonym for rosin. 
I had never heard of ralam before. The term is almost as vague as “rosin” because ralam (Hindi) simply means resin. It was extremely difficult to find reliable information, so I ultimately resorted to BARD. Accordingly, ralam could mean the resin of the chir pine (Pinus roxburhgii), but another possibility is sal resin (Shorea robusta). The reliability of this “source” is questionable.

Kashmir has a tart, spicy scent with a balsamic character. I notice a very subtle sweetness in the background, but basically the smell is deep and dark, tart, resinous and earthy.
Based on the scent profile, I think sal is a very likely ingredient. I find a slightly sour note in Kashmir, which I’m familiar with from this resin.
Raw, the incense sticks smell pungent and spicy to me and remind me of very intense spices such as allspice, clove or star anise, but without actually smelling like any of these.
Purely based on my memory, Kashmir have a similarity to Purification from the Reiki line by Goloka, or Holy Smoke by Fleur De Vie. (Unfortunately, I don’t have anything left of either to compare.) But I remember both as being much more “audience-friendly”. I find Kashmir to be very unvarnished, so to speak. Its scent has natural and kinda raw appearance. A robust smell that exudes a powerful calm.

Kashmir doesn’t correspond to the kind of scents I usually prefer, it’s not an explicit feel-good scent for me, but it smells fascinating and appealing. They are “different” and sometimes that’s just the right thing.