Tribal Soul Om Shanti Incense Sticks are hand-rolled Spiritual Series sticks built on a botanical base with aromatic resins and herbs. The 15 g pack comes with a ceramic incense holder in a slide-out box with a white bag wrapping.
Hand-rolled is a real specification rather than a flourish. The aromatic paste is worked onto the stick by hand instead of extruded by machine, which gives a fuller body and a slightly less uniform surface, and generally a rounder burn than a perfectly even stick manages. Sticks made this way look less machined and smell a little less flat.
The base is named too — botanical, with resins and herbs in it — rather than a neutral carrier dipped in fragrance at the end. That is what produces the temple-like register the listing describes: serene, a little austere, closer to a place of worship than to a room someone has scented for guests.
The name deserves explaining rather than assuming. Shanti means peace, and it is spoken three times at the close of many Hindu prayers and Upanishadic texts in the invocation known as the Shanti Mantra. The phrase is shared across Hindu, Buddhist and Jain practice, which is why it travels so widely.
We are not going to claim the incense delivers what the mantra asks for. It is named for a devotional invocation, and it accompanies practice rather than producing peace. What it offers is a fragrance many people find suits sitting quietly, which is an honest thing to want. Similar blends sit in our Incense collection.
No stick count or burn time is printed on the 15 g pack. Set the included ceramic holder on a heat-safe surface, light the tip and fan the flame out, and burn in a ventilated room away from children and pets. The rest of the range sits in our Tribal Soul collection.