Paine's Red Cedar - 32 Cones With Holder - Real Wood Incense

The reviews are mostly accurate from what I’ve read and experienced. They are kind of a pain to get apart. They crumble some and break into small pieces. I just don’t care because the smell is so spot on perfect. I grew up with a wood burning fireplace in the house but haven’t had one for almost 20 years. On a recent cold day I lit one up before I went outside to do some chores. When I came back in I’d have been willing to bet money there was a fireplace burning. It was just like I was walking back into the house after playing in the snow as a kid. I think this is the kind of product you either love or hate and that, for me, is 100% about the smell. This product nails it. I’ve ordered a similar product that comes individually as opposed to in bricks but if the smell isn’t perfect I’m more than willing to stick with Paine’s Red Cedar despite my grievances.

I bought these out of curiosity along with the Paine's balsam fir incense and find that these actually smell more like a forest than they do. The sticks are made of actual compacted cedar and burn well. I really love them and will be ordering more. One or two have broken as I've pulled them apart for use, but you just need to use a bit of care and then it's easy enough to detach without any loss. I imagine you'd have to be using too much force time and time again and not really learning any lessons along the way for that to make more than a couple unusable. There is a bit of a smoke smell along with the cedar itself but folks, that's what incense is. I have an electric fireplace that I turn on with these and a cd of ambient fireplace sound...it is perfect for a long cold day for us apartment dwellers.

The smell is nice and it does remain, but that doesn't really outweigh the negatives. These don't have a sharp point which means they are more difficult to light, and those that I did get lit with an even ember across the top didn't always burn all the way through. They arrive in a sheet you have to cut. This is not plainly clear in the product photos, nor is it in the description. Of the three rows (32 total) I ended up with 16 full cones, the rest broke as they were being separated. I tried by hand, I tried with a serrated knife, straight edge knife, and utility knife. There's a lot of condescending reviews about this, but I'd expect the manufacturer to improve their product. They could either ship it with the cones already separated, or modify their press to give a deeper groove so they split easily. This isn't an end user issue, it's a product one. I'll burn through the ones that made it intact, but I won't be buying it again.

So there's a ton of reviews of Paine's wood incense and I doubt I can really add much. Like most reviews state this isn't like a "traditional" incense, it's just wood. So when you burn it, it smells like burning wood, not like a perfume that smells like cedar oil or something. I prefer the cedar to the Balsam Fir, but I like both and I haven't tried the pinion pine yet so can't speak to that. Basically you should think of the smell as a small version of a woodstove or campfire. It's a clean wood smoke smell, but it's relatively strong, so probably best used in wood paneled basements or attics and cabins or lake cottages and such where a wood smoke smell wouldn't be out of place. As far as the burning quality I did have trouble at first, but found a couple reviews that recommended keeping it in a lighter flame for up to a minute and I found that worked really well. I tried using a jet lighter initially but it's a little too much, so although it burns down a good way, it won't necessarily stay lit. Low and slow wins the race I guess.

Best smelling Incense you can find on Amazon... Smells like your sitting by the fireplace in a cabin in the woods.

The incense smells great! Just like a fireplace burning. But the incense come in blocks that you have to break apart. Even with a knife the majority crumble and are unusable…it’s a shame because it smells really good…I just wish the company would break them into individual cones prior to sending cause I’ve only gotten two whole ones so far.

When you buy an item like this, you do so for one reason. The smells oh, and if they burn. Well, yes they burn easily, and yes they smell fantastic. Perhaps you've never sat out in the Arizona desert or been around a sweat lodge and smelled this beautiful aroma. If so, buy it. If you're going to whine over not breaking precisely into the little cone you had hoped for, perhaps a cone of silence is what you really need!

Underwhelming and somewhat disappointing. Getting the incense cone, term used very loosely, to light was not very easy but once I finally did get it to smolder it smelled better than I had hoped for. But the fact that they come in clumps of three or four cones with no preparations means they just crumble apart and there's not actually a cone just lumps. So basically for $16 I get 32 pieces of clumped up bits of wood that are not really cone shaped. They're mostly unusable because when you attempt to break off, for lack of better word, a singular cone it just crumbles into multiple pieces that are far from "cone" shaped. Difficult to light. Not even remotely cone shaped. Material is not stable to hold its shape and falls apart. It's like dealing with very well scented sawdust.