Agāra Incense
Agāra is the incense project of Alexandre Maël Armati, living in France.
He grew up in a Buddhist family with incense of all kinds and started developing his own recipes early on.
At 26, he travelled to India or Bengal for the first time and learnt the craft of hand-rolling incense sticks there. Two years later, he started making incense sticks for himself and friends. Some varieties just for the beautiful fragrance, but predominantly for religious and esoteric applications.
In summer 2024, Maël finally made incense his job.
Maël’s Agāra incense sticks are an expression and means of his deep interest in astrology and other occult teachings,
but the olfactory aesthetic by no means falls short in them.
Influenced by his experiences in India, he made a conscious decision to forgo the use of perfume oils as well as essential oils.
Maël’s incense sticks are masala agarbathi in the original sense; compositions of ground aromatic raw ingredients such as herbs, resins, woods and spices.
In November 2024, Maël contacted me on Instagram to tell me that he loves my blog and shortly after, he offered me samples. It wasn’t about reviews, but about sharing and to receive a bit of feedback. (For a couple of varieties, there’ll be reviews, nevertheless. 😉 )
We chatted for quite a while, and so I learnt about his deep love for classical Indian music, to which he devotes many hours of practice and contemplation daily.
Maël describes himself as a ‘freak’ who often clashes socially due to his excessively pursued interests. A certain eccentricity can’t be denied him, but what would the world be without free spirits and artists like him?
I, personally, can’t do much with astrology, so far, this dimension of his work is lost on me. I won’t go into it much in the reviews, either.
However, I can warmly recommend to everyone who does share this interested and would like to find out more about the metaphysical background of his incense, to familiarise themselves with his detailed product descriptions at his shop.