Natural, sustainable, fair-trade, and wildcrafted incense is not your standard hippy Nag Champa. It’s a delightful home-fragrance game-changer that’s empowering communities and sustaining our forests.
Many people burn incense for a variety of reasons from use in religious ceremonies and communing with nature to the simple act of ridding your home of funky odors. Making and burning incense is one of the oldest human crafts.
Incense can be broken down into two categories: indirect-burning and direct-burning. Dried sage leaves are a form of indirect-burning incense or non-combustible incense. They will not burn without the continued application of flame. Direct-burning, or combustible, incense is blended with oils or other mediums that allow the incense to stay lit for a smoldering effect that releases scent until the incense burns out. Incense sticks or cones fit this category.
The latest trend in incense is wildcrafted incense, which loosely refers to incense makers who gather, collect, or trade raw materials through a variety of sustainable means to make incense from all-natural ingredients. The focus is on using resources in a sustainable way and to produce a superior product. It’s certainly a trend that we can get behind and one that anyone who enjoys incense should as well.
Discover the best of wildcrafted incense with these three totally sustainable and delightful brands.
Wildcrafted Incense
For more than six years, the makers of Sacred Wood Essence have been working with the same family in Ecuador who source the best quality wood from the Palo Santo tree. They employ many workers in the area and provide a fair wage above the average of other local jobs. There is no harvesting or cutting down of trees which make it fully sustainable–the wood is only harvested from trees that have fallen. Palo Santo incense is similar to sage and cedar.
Sword+Fern botanical incense is ethically harvested, whole plant, loose incense. The company produces three varieties of natural, wildcrafted, chemical-free, and clean-burning incense for everyday aromatherapy, magical, or spiritual use. These are hand-blended collection of the whole resin and plant incenses. The scents offered are: Your Light, which is made with lavender, desert sage, and mugwort; Speak of Me, made from frankincense, black copal, and Douglas fir; and Time Garden, made with patchouli leaf, copal, and western red cedar needles. Truly heady stuff.
Juniper Ridge is the master of wildcrafted incense. The company offers up seven varieties of stick incense that are made with gathered and collected materials from the wilds of California. From Sweetgrass Campfire Incense, which smells like vanilla, fresh-cut grass, and cinnamon bread baking in the oven, to Douglas Fir Campfire Incense, which smells just like a mountain lodge fireplace and is perfect for the holiday season, Juniper Ridge uses only sustainably-sourced wildcrafted plants, tree sap, wood.
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Wildcrafted Incense Image via Juniper Ridge