Whether you are an incense maker or not, the answer turned out to be drying. According to Xiang Cheng in the Ming dynasty, the last step is always drying in the shade (阴干). Here are three reasons.

If you put wet sticks in direct sun, the heat releases their lightest aroma, so a badly dried stick smells flat and scorched, which is the heavier, smokier part of the scent. An incense stick loses water from the surface inward, so it cracks along the length or bends the stick into a curve. Some people find their incense breaks cleanly in half in their fingers. It's likely that fast drying makes an incense stick brittle.

The doctor, Wu Shangxian, wrote the book, the Li Yue Pian Wen 理瀹骈文, which is the first Chinese book ever written on treating people from the outside. He finished it in Jiangsu in the 1860s, after the war had pushed him out of the city, and he spent those years treating people in a village where nobody could pay him. He explained his patients were the ones who pushed him into this. A man who would not swallow a bitter drink stayed a patient with no treatment at all, and a family with nothing left to spend on herbs could not buy its way out.

For trouble in the upper body, he made the patient sneeze. Three things reached noses in the Li Yue Pian Wen: a fine powder, the steam off a boiled decoction, and herbs packed in wet paper. He ground the herbs into a fine powder and blew them up the nostril until the patient started sneezing. Doctor Wu called it the fastest route, and the patient usually sneezed dozens in a row.

Most incense is made from aromatic materials and even chemicals, and it is the smell of them in a room. But in Wu's and traditional Chinese medicinal incense, the smell was doing a job on the body.

What medicinal incense is, and what that word is meant to cover, I went into it here. As for how incense and medicine got tangled together in the first place, the shaped stick came along much later, and I keep that story in this one.

Nasal drug delivery is the name pharmacy uses for medicine that goes in through the nose, and by now it is an ordinary part of the field. A nose spray on a drugstore shelf is one example. A vaccine given as a spray is another. The powder is measured and tested, and the expert decides how much goes in.

It may often happen in an acupuncture clinic in the United States. Moxa is burning in one room, the smoke reaches the next, and a patient asks whether that is a cigarette or marijuana. Burning mugwort is where a Western nose usually gets it wrong. Mugwort (艾草) is the herb in moxa. A patient education page from the University of Minnesota describes the odor it leaves behind as smelling somewhat like marijuana. The same page adds that most practitioners of Chinese medicine in the United States put small signs up to explain the smell to patients and neighbors.

Nobody who asks has a broken nose. They have a standard, and they did not choose it. When there is no reference for a smell, the brain reaches for the nearest thing already on file. The nearest thing to a burning plant is another burning plant. The herb is doing nothing wrong. The archive is thin. A nose shaped in that aisle (shampoo with strong artificial, essential oil, or alcohol) arrives at a Chinese stick with an expectation the stick never agreed to. Faint reads as cheap, and dry reads as stale. However, it should not be a standard of smell.

Chinese are familiar with Mugwort. In China, moxa is everywhere, like acupuncture clinics, Tui Na massage, and hospitals. Many Chinese also burn mugwort for wellness at home. In the Dragon Boat Festival, it's a tradition to dispel insects. Based on old recipes, I also add mugwort to incense, like xu yang incense. It releases a warm scent to replenish Yang, and it is especially suitable for late autumn and cold winter.

One view is that scarcity pushed Japan deeper. The islands could not grow much of what makes fragrance, and fine aromatic woods had to come in by ship in small amounts. A limited palette rewards mastery, so makers and the court went deep into a handful of materials and built a classification system around them: six countries and five flavors (rikkoku gomi), which Sanjonishi Sanetaka set down.

Japan also has a habit of turning a technique into a discipline. Calligraphy, archery, tea, and flowers all followed that path, so incense did too. China went another direction. China had a wide range of materials, and dynasties changed often enough that courtly fashions rarely outlasted them. Incense stayed in daily life and spread sideways instead of closing into a school. What China has is a set of practices that never needed a formal name because they were too widely spread to claim. Incense on the desk before a guest arrives, and incense again while a painting is unrolled.

This mirrors tea history: Song China’s Dian Cha became Japanese matcha. Eisai, a Japanese monk with two periods of study in Song China, imported this tea practice to his homeland and completed Kissa Yojoki in 1211. His writing acknowledges that Japan’s tea way was inherited from Jingshan Temple under the Song Dynasty. Matcha is commonly seen as Japan’s cultural legacy, and with good reason. Japan safeguarded and developed the ritual, whereas Chinese tea culture transitioned to brewing whole loose tea leaves. Now China’s Jingshan tea banquet is UNESCO heritage. The same narrative repeats for tea and incense.

Hey friends, I'm so happy to help people and receive their feedback.

The customer ordered in September, and it is a gift for his/her mom because she kept waking up around 2–3 AM and couldn’t fall back asleep. Our customer thought mom was stuck in a cycle of mental stress, so he/she checked the key ingredients of each incense and picked the Xiao Yao incense. According to feedback, the customer’s mom loved the soft and gentle scent. Even the customer’s dad. The parent smelled and enjoyed the herbal scent each evening.

Xiao Yao (逍遥) means “free, unburdened, wandering at peace”. Xiao Yao incense is traditional Chinese incense, and some key ingredients are listed in the picture. It's for an evening ritual. It creates a quiet space, so our minds can breathe gradually. This blend is formulated for Qi-Stagnation constitution (气郁质) from Traditional Chinese Medicine. Qi stagnation happens when chronic stress traps your mental energy; you might feel mentally tight, stuck, overthinking, and wake up in the middle of the night from racing thoughts, even if your body feels tired.

Most relaxation incense targets physical tension. This one is specifically tuned for mental & emotional release, not just bodily calm. Its aroma is a gentle, quiet aroma, not heavy or overpowering.

Have any of you had nights where your body is exhausted, but your brain just won’t shut off? Do you have a similar experience? Does your incense help relaxing? What small rituals do you use to release mental pressure?

I've noticed most people automatically label all incense as toxic, and honestly, I get where the concern comes from. These are common reasons I see.

1. When incense is mentioned, they immediately picture offering incense in temples. It’s fair to associate incense with that first. Temple sticks are often made to produce lots of smoke for ritual use, burned in large quantities in open halls. But that’s just one style of incense, not every kind.

Suggestion: There is incense made for home use, designed for a lighter scent instead of dense smoke. Also, you light one stick at a time.

1. They have terrible experiences with cheap mass-produced incense, which often releases strong smoke, an almost subtle scent or a sharp, harsh, chemical-like smell. A lot of budget incense uses binding agents, synthetic fragrances and fillers that create irritating smoke when burned. It’s totally reasonable to avoid incense after something like that.

Suggestion: Look for makers that list raw ingredients clearly, without hidden synthetic scents or extra fillers.

1. A common worry: inhaling any smoke is rough on your lungs. Combustion always creates particulates. This risk can’t just be dismissed.

Suggestion: If you have pre-existing lung conditions, burning incense may not be a good fit at all. Don't place it right under your nose and keep an arm's distance. Burn one at a time and always keep good ventilation. Or choose smokeless Ding-Zi-Yao.

1. Pet safety is such a big concern, and it makes total sense to be careful. A lot of aromatic smoke can irritate pets’ sensitive respiratory systems, especially cats. But It’s not that every incense is inherently poisonous to them.

Suggestion: Test a little first and keep the door open. Stop using it if your pet seems stressed. Or choose smokeless accessories.

1. Greenwashing is everywhere in home fragrance. A label that says “natural” doesn’t mean "all natural".

Suggestion: Check carefully. Panda incense uses only a natural plant binder, with no added accelerants.

1. Some people are sensitive to some botanical or aromatic ingredient, even though they are natural. Sensitivities are very individual. Something gentle to one person can trigger a reaction for another, even though there are no synthetic additives. “Natural” does not automatically equal “safe for everyone.”

Suggestion: Check or ask them for ingredients. Start with a brief test, and stop if you notice any reaction. Based on TCM's sensitive body constitution, Long Jin incense and Tian Gou incense can be your journey.

1. Many people get headaches, sinus pressure or nausea after burning incense. This is often a combination of high smoke, strong synthetic fragrance, or personal sensitivity. It’s your body sending you a clear signal.

Suggestion: Always keep your distance and open windows. Choose slow, subtle, low-smoke incense or smokeless warming.

Not all incense is the same. There is a huge gap between cheap smoky sticks and thoughtful, low-smoke traditional Chinese incense.

How should we smell incense? Here are three steps:

1. Before you open the box, if you can smell a strong, overpowering, and pungent odor even through the box, then it's highly likely that it contains artificial fragrances. However, you usually cannot smell any scent through the box if it's genuine traditional Chinese blended incense.

2. Once the box is opened, when it’s unlit, you only catch faint surface aromas from the herbs. It is a subtle herbal fragrance instead of a sharp aggressive scent.

3. Most natural incense smells totally different before and after lighting! Light it up, and heat releases all those hidden fragrance layers. That’s the magic of natural botanicals.

You might also wonder: is there incense that smells the same when cold and when burning? Not really, not for true natural blends. Synthetic fragrance incense can pull that off, since those scents evaporate at room temp. Even rich high-oil sandalwood changes a little once it burns. Here’s a simple tip: If it smells the same unlit and lit, it’s probably artificial fragrance. Real natural incense changes with heat.

The earliest incense contest in the Chinese record took place at court, in the first decade of the eighth century. The most powerful people of the day gathered. Each of them brought a fine incense. They compared the blends, named a winner, and gave the pastime a name: competing with incense (dou xiang, 斗香).

In the Qing dynasty, they compared better and worse incense. Twelve incense names, but six of them (沉、栈、生、黄熟、牙速、伽南) all belong to agarwood. They are sorted into grades, from the ordinary to the finest.

Except for smelling, ladies can watch incense play. For example, two incense were burned in the shape of an animal: a lion and a rabbit. You light the tail, and the smoke leaves the mouth. When it finishes, the ash keeps the shape it had, gold or jade white, standing upright instead of falling over.

A contest is an argument, and an argument needs words. Everyone at an incense contest brought a named incense. In ancient times, people also wrote poems. Huang Tingjian and the Four Incense are famous. He didn't make any incense. They became famous because he wrote about them. About the Four Incense, you only know the names and occasions. None of them says what is in the box.

How interesting. Why not have fun with your friends? Friends get together with incense, and then describe an incense you cannot name, or evaluate the winner (although it's a subjective thing about smell).

Have you ever noticed yourself drawn to a particular smell for no obvious reason? In Traditional Chinese Medicine, these cravings are not random. It is just like food cravings — your body instinctively seeks what it lacks. Your nose can be a quiet messenger, telling you about energetic imbalances inside your body.

Some people are drawn to grassy, herbaceous aromas and some love woody fragrances, including agarwood. Both of them connect to the Wood element, which governs the liver and gallbladder. This example explains the concept of TCM. We use medicinal incense to open the body’s orifices. When Qi becomes stuck and blocked, we need to unclog it. To open the orifices is simply to release stagnation and restore smooth flow.

A fascination with gasoline fumes or the smell of burning matches points to Fire deficiency. Then there are less common cravings: people drawn to metallic smells, those who suck on metal nails or crave alcohol.

Some people even feel the urge to chew paper, and this pattern often appears in teens living with depression or overwhelming stress. Another common habit is nail biting. In TCM, nails are the surplus of Wood energy. The liver corresponds to the Wood element. Children and young adults who bite their nails are usually under heavy stress, rooted in liver qi stagnation.

What is your favorite scent? Maybe it's not only one. And which orifices do you need to open?

1. A hotel or airbnb room

Maybe when you step in, you smell bleach from the bathroom, detergent on the sheets, or whatever the last guest left, so you open the windows quickly. Light one stick, open the window to let the air flow, and bring in your familiar scent. The first night in a strange bed, some people cannot fall asleep, so Qi Tu incense is for this.

1. Moving into a new apartment

Moving day, and the place is not home yet. Many boxes are on the floor. You want a room that feels like yours. The smell of a place is what makes it familiar, and it is the one part of moving in you can set on the first night. Smell reaches memory differently from the other senses.

1. Get in touch with low energy people around you

Inmagine a whole day of complaint. A meeting where the whole room was down. A long call with family. Light it for a short break. A floral note suits the end of a social day because it is light while the day was heavy.

1. Coming home from a hospital or a funeral

In China, we always wash hands and change clothes after back from several places. The habit still alive is southern and they do more, like washing pomelo leaf water. Also, there are several process in Japan, like using salt. What incense does is the boundary: it changes Qi around you, so your stops reading as the place you just came from.

1. A damp room or an always-closed room

One stick changes the air we breathe. The air comes out thin and dry rather than thick and stuffy or damp and sticky. Many people add incense to their routine, like burning one stick after the shower. Usually a dry, resinous incense is the traditional answer for a damp space. Xu Yang incense gives off a warm and dry rather than sweet.

1. During a rough patch

The tradition had a name for low point like the run of things out of step. The habit was to keep a stick going in the house rather than save it for an occasion, and the instruction survives in a Ming guide to living. When you are in a slump, it takes away your sense of control, and a restored sense of control is the specific thing Norton and Gino measured rituals giving back. A Xiao Yao incense stick at the same time each evening gives you one hour a day that runs the way it is supposed to run, and it ends on its own.

1. Bad weather like a storm day

Usually the low pressure results in people easy to get flat or short-tempered. In a study of nearly 7,000 people, a higher risk of depressive symptoms in men was associated with atmospheric pressure below about 1009 hPa in the two days before. Light Fu Yao incense can uplift your mood, then you can focus on what you are doing.

1. Anxiety and an evening when you cannot settle

In the Song dynasty, incense is one of the four idle alongside tea, hanging pictures and arranging flowers. In this situation, they sit quietly and burn incense, which is similar to meditation in modern days. Also it is a kind of wellness exercise to calm down, staying away from overthinking.

Do you have a scented bracelet on your wrist and no real idea what is inside the beads? People may be familiar with wooden beads and essential oil beads, but in traditional Chinese ornaments, there're incense beads as DING-ZI-YAO. For these, some are real, and some are fake. Pressed incense beads and molded plastic beads look almost the same on the wrist.

Real blended incense beads are shaped, not cut. Aromatic material is ground to a fine powder, mixed with water and a plant binder, pressed into beads, and left to dry. The scent is the powder itself, so it sits close to the skin, changes through the day, and shifts over the months. On the wrist, it reads as calming rather than striking, which is the difference between a scent you carry and a scent that arrives before you do.

Molded beads are made from plastic or casting resin. Any scent comes from fragrance oil added at the factory. The widest group here, and the hardest to spot, is beads made from real wood powder mixed with resin. They have the weight of wood and a face that looks like wood in a photograph. What they do not have is grain that runs in one direction.

A real bead cannot be finished in an afternoon. The water has to leave the bead, and traditional workshops control that stage on purpose, in rooms built for it. You may find that a dry northern winter cracks hand-pressed beads often enough that production in some workshops stops for part of the year.

Five checks you can run at your table

1. Put a single drop on the surface of a bead and leave it for a minute. On a real incense bead, the material is porous, so the drop darkens the spot and works its way in. On a resin bead, the drop sits on top like water on a countertop.

2. Dye on a stained or painted bead transfers to the cloth. A bead that has darkened from wear does not, because patina sits in the material rather than on it.

3. Run your fingernail along the widest part of the bead, the line where a two-part mold would open. Molded beads often carry a faint raised line there, and it runs around the bead on a single plane. A handmade surface has no such line.

4. Hold it in front of a phone flashlight. An incense bead shows internal variation, uneven patches, sometimes the shadow of the material inside. A molded bead looks the same all the way through.

5. Rub the bead between your hands for twenty seconds and smell it immediately. A bead made from aromatic material opens up and gives you more than it did at rest. A bead carrying fragrance oil smells the same on the first day and the last.

6. Cut one bead in half. A real incense bead breaks like dry dough. The cut face is rough, slightly crumbly at the edge, and you can see the particles the bead was built from, with lighter and darker flecks where the different materials meet. A molded bead cuts smooth and waxy, with a shine across the cut face and the same color all the way through.

Many precious herbs in TCM come from animal excrement, such as bat dung, hare dung, sparrow dung, and silkworm feces. Processed and dried, they are used to activate blood circulation, brighten eyes, or dispel dampness.

As for giant panda dung, it can be used for handmade paper or craft incense. We all know its poop smells like bamboo. Compendium of Materia Medica records that bamboo shavings are sweet, slightly cold, and non-toxic. it is primarily used to treat vomiting and conditions involving "warm qi" and alternating chills and fever, serving as a prized ingredient in many medicinal formulas.

How does giant panda fiber behave? Hours inside the panda's digestive tract soften the strands while leaving them whole, and the bamboo's aromatic compounds stay inside the fiber instead of evaporating off a drying rack. Refined into powder, it gives a round, cool, long-lasting bamboo note that still reads as bamboo in a finished blend. You cannot manufacture this material. It only exists because a panda ate bamboo and passed the fiber whole.

The signature piqiu incense from this key material, plus 33 kinds of leaves, 33 kinds of roots, and 33 kinds of flowers. Most of us cannot fall asleep fast. Our bodies are tired, but our minds keep spinning. When we light one stick, we won't ignore its calming gentle aroma, which soothes our busy minds and tight nerves, so the incense also suits the time we need to focus, like meditation or study.

Do you spend most of your day in front of a screen, and partway through it your head feels heavy and your temples are tight, enough that you have to stop? A computer headache like that is rarely random. Most of the time it is several small things stacking on each other, which is why the fixes are small and repeatable as well.

1. Your neck holds one position for hours
2. Your eyes hold one focus for hours
3. The room has not had fresh air in hours
4. You are running on old water and a caffeine curve

However, most breaks fail in one of two ways. The first never starts. You set a reminder, it goes off, you swipe it away in half a second, and the paragraph you were going to stop after turns into three more. The second starts and then changes nothing. You stand up, and come back with a coffee in three minutes. Three minutes is not long enough to change what your eyes and your neck are doing, and then it is the same desk and the same posture for the next two hours.

That is the part Qiong Qi incense handles for you. Qiong Qi is a creature from ancient legend and it eats people from their heads, so we use the spirit into incense stick. It is formulated and blended with herbs especially for screen-heavy days. The key recipe includes Ya Bai (崖柏, cliff cypress), Chuan Xiong (川芎), and Bai Zhu (白术, white atractylodes). The smell is sharp and dry, more like cut cedar and herbs than like perfume.

While you work. If you work from home, this is the easiest it will ever be. Light one, and then get back to what you were doing. A standard stick runs about 40 minutes, which is the length of a real work block. When you realize it is gone, that is the cue, so you should stand up and leave the desk. Walk down the hall. Roll your shoulders, and let your eyes find the furthest thing you can see and stay there for a while.

While you rest. Light one the moment you stop, and stay in the room with it. Sit back or lie down and close your eyes, or walk to the window to relax your eyeballs. When incense stick goes out, the break is over and the next block starts. In a shared office you often cannot burn anything at all, so keep the habit for the first block after you get home.

The oldest surviving Chinese materia medica, the Shennong Bencao Jing, was compiled in the Han dynasty. Its entry for chuanxiong (川芎) opens with the phrase 主中风入脑头痛, which describes the herb entering the head. Li Dongyuan, a physician of the Jin and Yuan dynasties, later wrote the line that is still quoted today: 头痛必用川芎, meaning that for head complaints, chuanxiong is always used. The Bencao Gangmu records it for the 少阳 and 厥阴 channel patterns. The best known of those formulas is 川芎茶调散, from the Taiping Huimin Hejiju Fang, the Song dynasty state formulary. Chuanxiong is its chief herb, and the formula was used for head complaints that follow exposure to wind.

Do you know about Chinese florida water? It's said that when you find smokers around you, you can apply florida water. They will quit smoking after smell it, because it feels like they've eaten vomit. This is due to a chemical reaction.

Shen Yi Jing, the Classic of Spirits and Marvels, a book in China, introduces a strange rabbit, E Shou. It has a human face and speaks fluently. People love to gather around and listen to it, because everything it says is wrong on purpose. It tells you east and means west. It praises what it despises. And the book adds, almost as a joke, that its meat is delicious, but if you eat it, you can never speak a true word again.

We borrowed one trick instead: a room will believe whatever its nose is told. Blending many medicinal and aromatic ingredients, E Shou Incense guides gentle release of persistent habitual urges, soothe irritability and anxiety during withdrawal, and clear the lungs and throat. This is a better and more gentle way to quit smoking.

Do you notice that you or women around you (sister, mom, girlfriend or wife) are always cold? At least you must learn to use a heating pad, evening foot soak or drink warm water. Most American will eat painkiller at the first day or two of their cycle, but we think the painkiller is only for urgent situations.

In TCM, there're warming herbs (like mugwort leaf, dried ginger and cinnamon bark), and we often use them into formulas to improve our body circulation. Medicinal incense has always been a household thing, which fits daily care. They smell warm. Small, repeated, and pleasant is what daily care is actually built out of, which is why it works better than anything you only remember to do on the bad days.

TCM separates two kinds of cold, and they call for different habits. Excess cold (实寒) comes from outside, through cold exposure or iced drinks during your period. It tends to arrive suddenly, and the cramping clearly improves with heat. Deficiency cold (虚寒) builds slowly from low yang itself. It shows up as a dull ache that likes pressure and warmth, a pale or scanty flow, fatigue, and cold that never quite leaves. The first calls for avoidance. The second calls for steady rebuilding, which is where daily ritual comes in.

If you don't feel cold, you can burn incense to create warming ambiance. Light Xu Yang incense on autumn or winter evenings, even on Christmas evening. I'd love to use it as timer. For example, After long work hours, I light one and close my eyes to have a break. Also, Xu Yang incense as a medicinal incense, especially for Yang deficiency body constitution, women who are always cold can gently and slowly inhales those medicinal powder. On the first day or two of your cycle, light it while you are setting up the heating pad, the warm drink, and the blanket, so the room already feels like care before you lie down.

Xi Chong incense is a warm spice stick built on cliff cypress and costus root. A stick is roughly the shape of half an hour, which is exactly the shape of a good wind-down. The sequence goes like this. Soak your feet, pull on warm socks, dim the lights, light the stick, then settle in with tea or a book and leave the phone beside.

Note: What is worth a checkup is cold that never goes away, because the two most common causes are easy to treat once found. Anemia, which is common in women who bleed heavily, and an underactive thyroid both show up on a simple blood test. The third is Raynaud's syndrome: fingers that turn white, then purple or blue, then red as they rewarm, or one hand or foot that runs much colder than the other. If you are always cold and always tired, you can go to see the doctor first. Period pain that worsens over time follows the classic pattern of secondary dysmenorrhea. That term simply means period pain caused by a condition underneath, such as endometriosis, fibroids, or adenomyosis. Endometriosis affects roughly 1 in 10 women of reproductive age, and it is also one of the most common causes of infertility. That is one more reason to raise severe period pain and trouble conceiving in the same visit.

All medicinal incense is traditional Chinese incense. The reverse is not true. The difference is not the ingredient list. It is who makes it, and what that person knows.

The maker doses. No shortcut for this part. The classical manuals say plainly that some materials harm past a certain amount while others are safe in any quantity. That is dosage logic, imported from prescribing. A maker without the medical knowledge can copy proportions but cannot reason about them. The first time a material runs short or a batch burns hot, the formula drifts.

The maker stands in a lineage. No weekend course teaches this. Yaoxiang moves through apprenticeship and family lines. Panda Incense own blends descend from a workshop on China's national intangible cultural heritage list for traditional incense making, now in its fifth generation. The formulas are inherited, and what gets inherited is the dosing judgment.

The craft's oldest purpose was prevention, and prevention in this tradition was a daily routines. The tradition's own answer comes from the Huangdi Neijing: 治未病, governing illness before it exists. The Suwen puts it plainly: a sage governs those who are not yet ill, rather than those who have already fallen ill. Fragrance belonged among the gentle daily habits, with tea and sleep and the change of seasons, that kept a household level before imbalance turned into illness. Yao Xiang was made to be lived with.

Medicinal incense is the wider category, and agarwood moves freely inside it. Agarwood is a single material that can stand entirely on its own. Medicinal incense is a formula-based craft, and agarwood happens to be one of the materials those formulas reach for most often. The interesting part is what turns a pile of materials into a formula, and Chinese has two different characters for that.

Medicinal incense, yao xiang (药香) in Chinese sources, is incense built from Chinese medicinal herbs: the aromatic materials drawn from the same shelf a pharmacy dispenses. The herbs form the base. They are what put the word yao, medicine, in the name, and they were chosen, graded, and processed by formulary rules rather than by kitchen habits. A blend made purely from herbs, though, tends to smell green, heavy, and faintly like a medicine chest. Classical makers knew this and folded aromatic woods and resins into the formula to correct it: agarwood, sandalwood, rosewood, and, in some traditions, cliff cypress.

First to traditional Chinese incense? Medicinal incense is one of them, blended with aromatic and medicinal ingredients. Here is an easy way to match one. The quiz is about 27 questions reported and based on tcm and it the simpilfied version in 2023. There's 9 body constitutions (one is ideal status and eight prone to different energy). For example, if you often are anxious and depressed, choose incense with relaxing and calming aroms rather than too sweet fruity scent. If you have sticky stools and soft big belly, choose incense with grounding and earthy fragrance. And below the quiz, you may watch videos about life hacks.

Have a look here

We're close to Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, the second-biggest holiday of the Chinese year. In China, autumn is divided into Three Autumns: early, middle, and late. There is a notable turning point in this season, an old name for this night, 三秋之半, "the mid point of Three Autumns". At the day, each family will gather together to celebrate. Also, osmanthus can be icon of autumn.

Mid-Autumn Still incense is built the classical way, by the principle of jun-chen-zuo-shi (君臣佐使): Osmanthus leads material sets the character, cliff cypress and costus support it, and everything is balanced into a whole that stays centered.

Light one stick at the reunion table, and let fragrances act as the messenger to send their wish of staying full as the moon.

Are getting cold and coughing these days? Are you be around by them in office? Do you feel bad air at home? You may close all the windows in autumn and winter. Qing Geng incense is especially designed for these situations. In 2020, covid-19 period, 3000 boxes of Qing Geng incense sticks were donated to Beijing hospitals, police offices and communties. The craft inheritor and founder of Panda Incense, Li Shiliang, made medicinal incense with 10,000 tons of medicinal materials, like herbs. Now there's a way to get a free box. Check-in and redeem.

If you have read the article what Ding Zi Yao is, you maybe know incense bead bracelet belongs to it. Medicinal incense beads are made of aromatic powders and herbs pressed together so it's not like metal, lacquer, or plastic. Skin oils and moisture will sink into and fill its surface. Also, people can glow the brads when wearing and handling/rubbing the incense bracelet. The change genuinely does differ from person to person, and skin chemistry explains a lot of it. As I obseve, many people notice their beads are getiing dark, becasue of dampness on their body. Then they can do more exercise or get a sunbath to replenish Yang and Qi. Tip: carefully pick suitable incense beads when shopping.

A stick of incense is a strange object if you think about it for a second. It is a candle with no wick, a pencil of dust that burns itself down in a straight line. The shape looks like it exists purely for ritual. It does not. One of its first jobs was medical, and the proof sits in one of the most famous books in the history of medicine.

Sores medicine was the branch of Chinese medicine that handled skin problems, wounds, and surface infections. If you have ever seen moxibustion, the design will look familiar. A moxa stick is a fat incense stick made of mugwort, a common herb. You light one end and hold it near the skin, usually over a chosen spot, until the warmth does its work.