Buying Guide to Morning Star Incense

Since my first encounter with it as a kid, I've always loved incense. There's something beautiful and calming about lighting the flame, watching it catch and then blowing it out; the ember remains and begins to send forth coils of scented smoke. But much of the incense that's easiest to find in the U.S. (Nag Champa, for instance) is sweet and heavy, and it often lasts far longer than desired.

Several years ago I discovered Morning Star incense, made by the Nippon Kodo Co., Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan. The sticks are rather small and are composed entirely of compressed incense, rather than packed around a central wooden skewer. This means that the entire stick, except the small segment at the very bottom protected by the burner, is consumed when the incense is lit. The sticks burn for approximately 25 minutes, and their fragrance is subtle and natural.

Morning Star incense is available through several online retailers and can be found in many Japanese food and housewares stores. A box of 50 sticks sells for $2-3; a box of 200 sells for $5-6. Each box also contains a small incense burner suitable for use with Morning Star. The burner is essentially a small tile of pale blue porcelain with a hole in the center in which to prop the unlit end of the incense.

Morning Star incense comes in twelve scents. My favorites are cedarwood and sandalwood, though I'm curious to try both pine and green tea. The other available scents are rose, cinnamon, patchouli, amber, lavender, musk, vanilla, and jasmine.

What I like best about the sandalwood and cedarwood incense is their aroma of wood rather than flowers or sweet resins. Wood fires are illegal in New York City, but sometimes on a crisp winter evening, strolling down the street, one can catch a whiff of fragrant wood smoke in the air. These two incenses evoke that smell.