Who doesn’t love cinnamon?  No one that I know of, but I doubt that this offering from Hem is going to be love at first sniff for those legions of cinnamon lovers.  In the package it smells wonderful.  Evocative of cinnamon buns, cinnamon toast and those cinnamon twist things you get from a certain pizza chain.  When you ignite it though, it becomes a different scent altogether.

To steal from Douglas Adams, it creates a scent that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike cinnamon.  Which is to say that it does smell like like cinnamon, but with an unpleasant note that I found to be very distracting.  My guess is that it is from the charcoal the stick is made from.  It doesn’t smell exactly like fuel of any kind, but there is something oily smelling in the smoke.  Interestingly to me, you can see two different colors of smoke coming from the stick as you burn it.  A pure white and a smoky grey.  I won’t even speculate as to which is charcoal and stick and which is fragrance, but I am sure that is the reason for the two colors of smoke.

To be fair it isn’t a horrid smelling incense.  In fact it can be pleasant in small doses.  For instance in a large room that you only pass through now and then, or as seepage into one room from another.  Direct exposure, i.e., reading with it burning near you is something I wouldn’t recommend. Personally it works best to me as a potpourri on my desk.

I am not certain you will be satisfied with this if you like the sugary smell of the cinnamon bun place in the mall and equate the smell of cinnamon with that.  You will probably be satisfied with it if you are a true connoisseur of cinnamon and know that it can exist in many different varieties of scent.