Phool – Nagchampa

Phool is a start-up in India that’s targeting a growing group of higher-earning people with their high-quality and well-designed packaging and their sustainability marketing.
Their thing is collecting tons of the flower waste from temples in India and ‘upcycling’ it into incense. The flowers are dried, ground, mixed with ‘aromatic ingredients’ and processed into sticks and cones, which are then dipped in perfume after drying.
Temple flowers are considered sacred, so they can’t just be thrown away. Instead, they’re dumped into the Ganges, where the pesticides on them pollute the water.
Yes, you read that right: pesticide-laden flower waste is turned into incense and sold as a sustainable premium product.
By the way, this information comes directly from one of Phool’s promotional videos. It’s also mentioned in the video that these flowers are contaminated with other toxic substances like arsenic, lead, and cadmium.
To top it all off, the Phool website has the tagline “Good For You, Good For The Planet & Good For The People Who Make It” written above the video. I’m honestly at a loss for words.

I got these samples from Sascha, who runs the Indiaroma shop. However, he doesn’t sell Phool; the sticks are from his private collection. He ordered them from Aavyaa, a shop in India that ships worldwide. (Free shipping on orders over ₹5000/about €55, thanks in part to my colleague Steve’s influence. He reviewed the cone version of Nagchampa on Incense in The Wind.)
Phool – Nagchampa costs ₹495 at Aavyaa, which is about €5.40. A pack contains 40 sticks, each about 25cm long, with a burning time of 35 minutes.

The raw sticks smell piercingly jasmine-like and a bit soapy.
The amount of soot the stick produces when lit is alarming, to say the least. It takes a remarkably long time for the stick to develop an ember. If you blow out the flame too quickly, you’ll need to relight it over and over until the stick finally glows. Even then, the burning isn’t consistent, and sometimes the sticks are on the edge of extinguishing.

Now for the scent:
I only tested the Nagchampa outdoors.
Phool – Nagchampa smell like someone’s using a jasmine air freshener to set an old cupboard from a damp basement on fire, where they’d previously spilled lamp oil in. And somewhere, there’s a used diaper lying around.
They smell like something that wasn’t meant to be lit was set on fire.

An acquaintance of mine who also bought this variety wrote to me saying, “Nagchampa should be called dog shit instead.”
I haven’t yet heard what Sascha thinks, as I didn’t want to be influenced any further. All he said was that he’s “very curious” about what I’ll have to say.

Don’t be fooled by the fancy packaging. Phool incense is perfumed waste, and that’s exactly how it smells.