from Ellie Voyyd's neocities
TODAYS REVIEW:
HEM Incense, Various (Mugwort, Citronella, Musk, Patchouli)
Gonna be honest, folks... HEM the brand is for the most part, terrible. I mean, most are better at least than some Walmart or off brand stuff, but HEM is to me notorious for making almost every scent they produce extremely floral and powdery even if it shouldn't be. Granted, I do give them a lot of credit for the insane potency of their scents - all of them are well... you could burn one a week and still have your place smelling that way a month later. As I said, though, they make almost everything powdery and flowery. The worst offender is their Musk, which smells nothing like musk and instead has a spicy powder scent. Absolutely inconceivable...
Click to hear my horrible experience with HEM citronella, and citronella broadly.
I once ordered several of HEM Citronella in bulk - thinking it might be nice to burn outdoors when I had a backyard and had bonfires, and maybe repel some bugs. Well, I don't think I ever even lit a single stick, because when they arrived the smell was so strong that everything in the entire house reeked of citronella for weeks, months. It was so strong that I threw the bag of them into the back of my garage. This then resulted in the entire garage reeking of citronella - and this wasn't your average citronella, it had the signature "flowery-powdery" smell of HEM, which to me is specificaly horrible because its my personal opinion that citronella is best as a vegetal scent or even somewhat earthy or woody, but making it flowery or powdery is just overpowering to the extreme.
Well, anyway... Many years, I wrote them off and wouldn't touch them. I finally did once in a international foods store somewhere buy one just because I wanted to get more than just a drink, and it was the HEM patchouli, sitting alone on a dusty shelf in the back of an aisle that looked like it hadn't been travelled through since the 70's. Was not expecting much, but smelling the pack itself I was at least relieved to notice that it didn't violently reek. However, I chalked this up to it being extremely old, likely sitting there for decades.
Took it home, lit it, expecting the same old thing from HEM.
What I experienced was something... earth-shattering...
Like, as earth-shattering as the first time I tried Kombucha, being at that point someone who hated any "healthy" foods.
Qualitatively, also similar to my first time trying Kombucha, which to my american junk food addicted 20-something palate tasted... Absolutely alien. Like, so unlike anything I had ever tasted before that I was just truly speechless for many days afterward. A friend let me try it, and my mind kept going back to it... I got one for myself, I would take a sip of it, then let it sit in the fridge. Then, I'd find myself thinking about it...
It was so strange. It was so inconceivable to me, that it became... seductive. Not tasty, not "pleasurable" in the Kantian sense, but... sublime... That, I guess, is how acquired tastes work - it was similar with coffee but less so. It wasn't that i desired the thing, but how, perhaps, this thing exists, as it is, so absolutely beyond desire itself... When I thought of Kombucha, i couldn't think of "bad" or "good" - all I could think of was its overwhelming uniqueness, its awe-inspiring, ineffable self-similarity...
Well, this was the type of experience I was also granted when I lit that patchouli HEM incense.
Before I describe it - while I have described my own reaction - I should describe my roommate's reaction as well, so you understand.
Maybe less than five minutes after I lit it, my roommate came over and seemed panicked, saying that something was burning. I said, yes, incense. They said, no, it smells like burnt plastic. I told them, its the incense. They refused to believe me and searched my work area, convinced I had left my soldering iron on or something. Eventually, I made them smell it but they still didn't believe it, although they did say it "might be" the incense, and that it wasn't "quite exactly burning plastic smell".
The thing is, burnt plastic has many different smells. I've smelled a bunch of different kinds, being an insane artist person with no regard for my well-being. This wasn't really what i would call burnt plastic smell, although to most people they might say it has a note of that.
I personally think a lot of plastics and circuit boards and stuff smell really nice... unfortunately... But, HEM Patchouli still has a... vegetal character. It smells like an alien plant, but also, while i wouldn't say "earthy", i might instead say "mud", which is odd. Like an alien algea swamp of some kind. But it also has a distinct hint of "airiness" as well, but rather than "air" i would say maybe the way outer space smells - that just catapults the entire blend into orbit. It is unreal. It is the smell of... unreality. It smells wrong, it smells like it shouldn't exist, the same way that first sip of kombucha tasted.
And so, I love it. I love how, to this day, having burned a lot of it, I still can't quite say if I actually "like" or "dislike" it. I respect it.