Pure Frankincense "Pure Resin Over Stick" Incense - Nature Nature - 10 Sticks

I am a long time Frankincense fan. There are only a few smells I can tolerate. I like the smell of baking bread, and coffee. I like the smell of fresh rain. I like orange, but lavender and patchouli give me a headache. Scented candles make me want to barf. Gardenia is okay in small doses as is camphor. I cannot tolerate at all most synthetic mixtures and perfumes, including deodorant soaps, cleaning solutions, all cosmetics, which I do not use. Musk gives me a migraine. So I am picky about my Frankincense.The best I have found yet on Amazon came from Yemen, was the sacra variety (this is Carterii) and I have not seen it here in awhile. Wikipedia describes at least three different varieties, some from India. This is a grey/white stick. It looks like powder over resin.The ones I used to buy from Yemen were hand rolled in paper rolls and were brown resin. What I made (see below) was also brown resin from the cheapest tears for sale here, the $11 a bag ones (and there are even cheaper ones). The distillation process does remove the impurities and concentrates the oils however, you have to start with good raw material.Now what I see for sale here are the "tears" which per ounce or gram are much much cheaper but vary in quality. Grey appears to be higher quality than amber but not always. My guess is the grey is the Indian variety and the amber or brown tears are from Yemen or Africa.The only way to be sure is to send a sample to a lab and ask them for a purity report. Herb purity testing is $70 for a professional lab's services per sample. I am guessing they use mass spectroscopy and various reagents to compute from density what is in each sample they get regardless of what the sample is. Like police labs. It is not practical for the average consumer to send a sample to a lab unless the consumer is a doctor or a scientist already working with a lab.So I am a private person not a medical professional. I had a bag of tears sitting there. I learned after googling around that the tears have to be processed. Like one of the other customers who posted that he could not use the tears for the purpose he bought them for, my first bag of tears did sit on the bottom of my desk drawer for over a year. Interesting metaphor for my life, perhaps. In any event, after cleaning out my crevices, I looked up processing techniques. Ah-ha, I discovered, the tears can be processed.I made a small but fragrant mess (see review of silicon bowl) trying to make my own frankincense stick, since I prefer stick incense. Like the other customer, I've never had much luck keeping the charcoal bricket thingies hot enough to burn the resin directly. For a church with alter boys and girls the alter children would fan the flames, move the brickets around and all of this would be in open air. For a church using it once a week, the resin tears are more practical if there is someone to fan the flame and keep the coal hot. For me alone with a tiny burner it is not practical. Frankincense wants a bigger space than I can give it, to burn openly. But with a stick, I get a slender white tendril of smoke moving in a straight line to the heavens. A stick burns evenly and continuously.This stick is the best one so far I have found on Amazon. Price is a bit high for regular use in a church or for "aromatherapy," reflecting the fact that raw material is an African/Arabian tree and the harvesting process is very similar to that of opium, it has to be done by hand. The resin has to be heated evenly to melting point, but not burned or scorched. This is a little like making caramel. The sticks then have to be dipped by hand, dried and packaged by hand. So they say made in USA and they do appear to be hand made. I do not know if they are or are not, but there is a hopeful quality to these. I have used about five packages so far.This month I ordered the extract/oil to see what the commercial stuff is supposed to look like. My extract looked like honey.I could prepare more of my own resin from tears sold here but as mentioned it makes a sticky mess. In the end I used most of it for a somewhat sticky but very effective healing hand lotion. For the lotion, cutting it with castor oil seems to work.I extracted the tears into EverClear/alcohol, not into water. I still do not see an easy steam extraction method. I have seen one video of a guy making lavender extract with a pressure cooker, it does not look safe but seemed to work. I tried a water extraction in a water distiller, it did not work, the tears just got hot and melted but sat there. It could be I needed more water mixed in, I am not sure and did not yet find any water distiller instructions for extracting oil from tears. I think there is some way to set up a glass cooling system which drips into a beaker then separates oil on top and water below. One would pour or pipette the oil off. I just do not see such a contraption for sale here (yet).In any event the alcohol method makes a lot of resin but the resin hardens very quickly into a hard crystal. So if one wanted to use tears to make stick incense, one needs to have the resin hot, the sticks ready, drying place ready, etc., and work quickly. I will update this review after I try with the commercial oil extract which is $20 for 30 ml. I don't know how many ml I will use per stick.So if you are not picky, and you want to save money buy the cheap stuff, the long dark sticks. Those to my nose are "saccharine sweet." If you can find the short brown hand-rolled sticks that look like Japanese sticks but come from some other place (Turkey?) get those. Meanwhile this is probably the best made in the USA Frankincense you'll find at the moment on Amazon. It smells vaguely like pine trees, has a barky aroma. Close your eyes breathe it in and imagine you are on a magic carpet somewhere in Turkey. Ali-Baba and Genni in a bottle. It has that effect.

I bought these sticks because they seemed to be the most pure resin frankincense sticks available.Smell: Incredible, like pure frankincense resin with a hint of something in the binder (sandalwood?); unfortunately they smell really strongly of frankincense oil even unlit so dont store near other incense (maybe they're a good air freshener?)Price: A little pricey but worth itPackaging: I wish it wasnt sent in an envelope with little padding, but my initial order came unscathedConclusion: I highly recommend these sticks, theyre the best Frankincense sticks I've found so far!

This was the first time that I tried out a "resin over stick" incense and I have to say I was impressed with the potency. One stick burns for quite a while and the scent will definitely fill up your whole place. If you like the Frankincense smell, then you will really like these.

If you don't have an electric burner or like messing with the oils, but want the smell of genuine frankincense than this is for you. It might seem expensive but each stick does in fact burn for at least an hour. I'm pretty sure that they also use real frankincense to make these as they smell exactly alike. I am very satisfied, and this is where I will be buying mine from now on.

These are meh, not nearly as good as the ones from Ibn Saif Trading that I'd been burning for years, but alas, the retailer who carried them went out of business in Jan. These don't burn as long & don't have that distinctive, Oman hougari frankincense odor.

Although it smells relatively well, burning generates a lot of smoke making this unusable indoors.

Pure frankincense resin with a fresh, earthy scent that conjures a wonderful sense of calm. Nature Nature makes the best incense, no burning smell like you'd find with other brands. This incense is very slow burning, lasting about one hour.

Potent. Slow burning. Not sure if headache was before or after