Balarama | Zam Zam, Spiritual Sky and others
Balarama is an incense producer in Thailand that makes ‘room fragrance products’ for companies in the USA, Canada and Europe. I got all the samples from Steve (Incense in The Wind) in May (2025). You can find all his reviews of them listed under his post about Balarama.
This type of stick is called ‘foil wrapped incense’ due to how they are packed. I’ve always perceived this style as very UK-typical, but that could also be because you don’t find much about it outside of Steve’s blog.
Sascha (one of my incense friends) has told me that they’re to be found virtually everywhere in England; however, he remembers that they were also briefly available here in Germany during the 90s.
Steve’s collection of foil-wrapped incense sticks.
As you can see in the picture, the Balarama sticks have quite a long, bare bamboo. Steve has shortened them (and sometimes the sticks overall) so that they fit in sample bags.
Zam Zam – Frankincense
The raw smell reminds me of cleaning products and soap.
When lit, it surprisingly smells less unpleasant, which is because it mainly smells of smoke. In the smoke smell I find a dry, slightly resinous tone that’s apparently called ‘incense’ in perfumery. Added to that is tart soapiness.
The cheapest frankincense smells better than that, IMHO.
Spiritual Sky – Frankincense & Myrrh
Unlike with the other sticks, the bamboo of Frankincense & Myrrh is split and angular, not round-cut.
The raw smell is perfumed, with a minor association to toilet air fresheners; I also find an idea of resinousness.
When lit, the smell is similarly smoky as with Frankincense and even somewhat pungent, but I can at least recognize the overall concept. It reminds me vaguely of a handful of run-of-the-mill masalas from Satya and Vijayshree (specifically Nag Breuzinho), which also want to smell like certain resins. None of them actually succeed.
Zam Zam – Black Love
The raw stick smells perfumed-soapy, but not entirely unattractive.
When lit, I find the smell smokier than with Frankincense; it’s a biting smokiness.
The perfume comes through as a floral, sweet smell that however seems to lack any character.
Zam Zam – The Lick
This stick smells like peach-scented shampoo to me when unlit.
The burning stick has an intensely pungent smokiness that makes me cough.
What I pick up from the perfume is a generic sweetness.
Zam Zam – Ladies Night
I had to laugh when I discovered this disassembled incense stick in Steve’s package. Unlike with Narsil, you probably won’t reassemble these parts.
Ladies Night has the most pleasant raw smell for me out of this selection of Zam Zam sticks. It’s a sweet, floral, generically feminine perfume. Quite fitting for the name.
In contrast to the others, this perfume manages to master the smoke smell.
It smells a bit like in a stuffy nightclub. It somehow even reminds me of the smell of fog machines, but that could be pure association.
Zam Zam – Bakhoor
Soapy raw smell with warm-spicy notes.
Years ago, I bought a sandalwood bakhoor in Berlin. It was a bag with very fine, oil-soaked wood splinters, more like sawdust. I never really used it because the smell was too soapy for me.
When I then started making incense sticks, I did an experiment: I sieved out the finest particles and mixed them with Laha and formed incense coils from them.
These actually smelled astonishingly similar to these incense sticks when burning.
The burning stick rapidly builds up an odd sour-spicy smell in the room that I find very obtrusive. The soapiness also persists when burning.
It does smell like a bakhoor, but not like a good one.
Wicked Dragon – Vanilla
Vanilla lets the vanilla concept be recognized both in the raw smell and when burning. It’s the typical, very sweet smell of vanilla flavouring, which doesn’t get lost beside the smoke smell of the sticks. Unfortunately, this has, in contrast to the other sticks described here, a cigarette smoke-like character that I find particularly unpleasant.
This stick is darker than the others; I wonder if there’s a connection to the different smoke smell.
Kuumba – Carhartt
Kuumba is a brand from Japan that likes to collaborate with other brands; in this case with the clothing brand Carhartt.
Steve considers in his review whether these might be produced by Balarama, but this is far from certain.
I’m including them in this collective review because stylistically they’re actually distinctly similar.
The unlit sticks smell like toilet pucks with ‘ocean breeze’ fragrance.
The burning sticks have a different base smell than the Zam Zam incenses. Less biting, but instead reminiscent of burning sawdust with some cardboard mixed in.
The perfume no longer seems like that of toilet pucks now; it’s more restrained and has a somehow modern, sober freshness. It creates the image of an open-plan office for me – which is one of the strangest associations that incense has ever triggered in me.
Conclusion
After I worked my way through these samples on a lazy afternoon, my nose feels unpleasantly dry. 😐
In a certain way, my experience with these sticks resembles that which I have with the incense cones of German brands like Crottendorfer and Knox. For me, they’re (predominantly) perfumed smells that remind me of artificially smelling air fresheners and often don’t manage to cover the harsh smell of the burning base material.
Now, one might think that people who like Balarama incense sticks might also get on better with said cones. However, Steve rates Crottendorfer overall much worse than Balarama.
It’s interesting that Steve wrote in a comment a while ago that he sees a similarity between some Chinese incense sticks and the German cones, which I don’t.
One thing’s certain: this type of incense stick is not for me, and I have trouble understanding the appeal.
And I get the sense from your review that, even though you didn’t rate the compositions, you had some fun exploring them – particularly as the scents were so easy to identify, and there was no complexity.
I sometimes want that complexity. But I also at times just want the simplicity. And other times I want the area in between.
Honestly, I wouldn’t call if “fun”; it’s interesting to experience such incenses for once, but I’m also glad once they are gone. I don’t enjoy the smell they leave in a room, be it while burning or afterwards.
The relaxing simplicity, I rather find in natural mono-scent sticks like those coming from Auroville. Or some of those Chinese ones. They don’t feel crude to me; not in the way you seem to perceive them. Those are scents I understand.
I rate these higher because the scents are more fun. For me Crottendorfer lack imagination and ambition when it comes to creating their fragrances. I am having more fun with Huss and particularly with Carl Jager.
The appeal in these sticks is the fun of the scents. As simple as that! They are not at all intended to be seriously studied or anything. Just burned as fun room fresheners.
In our house we mainly burn incense as room fresheners. There are other uses as well. Simply covering up bad smells (cat food, toilet, kitchen, etc) is our base everyday use, and consumes most of our incense. We tend to use the cheap incenses with a strong scent for this – though we would rather the scents are nice, are different, and are fun. Then there is the general room freshener – where we’d like a pleasant background scent. UK homes are pretty much closed up during the winter because of the cold, so we tend to burn more incense in the winter. In the summer it’s nice to have windows open and let in some fresh air, though as we live in a city, and our garden is small, the outside smell isn’t always as positive as it might be.
Another use is to create a particular atmosphere or mood. And this is where the better incenses tend to be used. And then there are times when I want to burn an incense because I particularly like the scent and/or construction, and enjoy paying attention to it like a painting or piece of music. This tends to be the most complex and interesting incense – such as you make. But, by far, the most incense we burn is the everyday stuff. And I do believe that is what 99% of incense buyers do – buy incense to cover up smells and/or create a pleasant scent in the home. And mostly they are not paying attention to the scent journey, or how the fragrance was constructed. They just want something that smells nice, and they enjoy the convenience and vibe of an incense stick.
Sometimes we can all get locked into our own experiences and forget to put ourselves in the shoes of other people. When burning incense I like to get into the culture of the people who made the incense, or for whom the incense was made. Which is generally why I prefer to know who made the incense. I feel closer to the experience, and understand the incense a little more. I feel somewhat divorced when the incense has been rebranded.
So, yes, I like these Balarama sticks because they are fun and don’t assume to be anything other than fun. They are great value – they don’t cost much, and burn for a long time with a decent weight of fragrance – not too much, and not too little. I don’t think they are special or clever, and are not sticks I think about. We just light them and forget them, and let the fragrance wander around and do its thing.
But, yeah, on the whole perfumed wood dust is not my favourite incense format. But if the scent is a little bit fun, I can get along and be charmed by that.
Yeah, I can see that. I think their whole nostalgia shtick has a quite limiting effect on them. You cannot be innovative in any way with your product if your whole identity is celebrating the past.
Actually, that’s exactly the point I’m not getting. I couldn’t use them as room fresheners, as they would make a room rather smell worse to me.
I think we are not too different in how and why we use incense, we just see different incenses as “fun room fresheners”.
I don’t think German homes are much different in that regard.
I just don’t like burning incense without windows open, that’s why I rarely burn in winter.
It’s surely different when living in a city, with all the city stenches. Here we have the summerly “eau de manure” instead, when the farmers are fertilizing their fields, or just from nearby stables or pastures. XD