I wasn’t expecting a great deal from this cedar incense stick by Hem after I experienced a pretty bad failure on their part with a cinnamon scented stick.  I mean, how hard is it to get the smell of cinnamon wrong?  To show you how hard that is to do, I will follow this up with a short post explaining how to take ordinary ground cinnamon and water to create your own cinnamon incense cones.  So with this stick I wasn’t expecting very much and I wasn’t disappointed.

Unlike Nippon-Kodo’s cedar from their Morning Star line, this cedar isn’t clean.  It has some fairly unpleasant notes in it that clash with what could be a decent cedar scent.  You can smell that decent cedar scent lurking in there with the other scents in this stick and that is too bad.  It should be clean, crisp and right on top.  Not buried among a half dozen other scents that muddy it up.

The fairest review I can give the stick is that it has a muted, earthy cedar scent.  If you found a cedar log in a river and burned it before it could dry you would have a good idea of what this stick smells like.  This stick almost works but just falls short.  If you like cedar then I can’t recommend Morning Star Cedar enough.

Overall it isn’t a horrible stick, but true fans of cedar or people who own cedar chests or cedar shoe racks will not be impressed.

Check it out here.