Why not change your mood and your atmosphere by making some herbal incensed at home?
Do you love the vibes and atmosphere created by burning good incense? Have you ever thought about using all-natural ingredients and creating your own incense?
You can actually make them at home – cheap and fast. Keep reading to learn more about the effects of herbal incense and how to make incense at home.
Dank Herbal Incense Sticks Set the Mood on Fire
Change your atmosphere and set the mood when you burn incense you’ve made from scratch. There’s something about the aromas swirling off a smokey incense, casting their scents throughout a room that’s calming, relaxing, and for some even transcending. Of course, this only makes sense because they are wildly popular in ritualistic and religious practices.
Just wait. It goes deeper.
Burning natural herbal incense can also have positive effects on the body and mind. Desired mental and physical effects of burning incense include:
- Clearing the mind
- Reducing anxiety
- Inducing relaxation
Depending on the herbs being chosen, burning herbal incense can actually work just the same as other types of aromatherapy. Essential oils are added to home-made herbal incense sticks and can deliver a host of benefits. Depending on the natural oil chosen, your incense could increase confidence, boost creativity, and even heighten sexual desire.
Making Herbal Incense at Home with All Natural Ingredients
Incense sticks available on the market are not always safe. In fact, many of them include noxious substances that can be harmful to your health and trigger respiratory symptoms for some.
If you want to protect yourself and your family, yet still enjoy the aromas of burning herbal incense, make them yourself! Plus, when you’ve made them from scratch you can also be assured you’ve only used the highest quality ingredients to produce the most euphoric effects.
Choosing Which Types of Herbs to Use for Incense
What are you making? What do you want to smell? What type of aromatherapy or desired effects are you trying to achieve?
Figure out what type of herbal incense experience you are after in order to buy the right ingredients. Get the scent you want from your incense when you choose any herb that you enjoy to smell. Go wild and mix up a couple of different herbs you like for a unique and satisfying experience.
If you are unsure where to start, check out some of the following herbs and resins:
- Sandalwood
- Myrrh
- Juniper
- Frankincense
- Cinnamon
If you want to get a feel for how your incense is going to smell, take the dried herbs and put them on top of a burning coal, like those used in a Shisha pipe. Some herbs fuse well. Others don’t. Check out how your unique combo smells burning before actually making it.
Use Woody Plants for an Incense Base
You need an herbal incense base so that your sticks burn nice and steadily over time. It’s not very much fun if you lit up the sticks, and they burned out right away. So, you got to make the base.
Charcoal or woody plants, such as willow and sandalwood are often used for incense base. The substance is ground up into sawdust using a processor or blender.
Lather Up with an Herbal Incense Liquid
Want to go cheap? Use water as your liquid. However, if you wanted to add essential oils or tinctures into the incense, you add it to your chosen liquid or use them in place of the liquid. These substances will essentially “layer” and promote relaxing aromatherapy.
How to Colour Your Home-made Herbal Incense Sticks
Want green, blue, brown, or another color of incense? Throw in a couple drops of food colouring to add some life to your incense sticks. Some herbs possess very rich pigments and can also be used to add colour to your liquid.
Why You Need an Herbal Incense Sticks Bonding Agent
Because it acts as the “glue” that holds everything together on your incense stick, you need to use an agent that will bond and hold the herbs, powders, and oils in place. Gums and herbal resins are used to bind the ingredients and shape the incense sticks. Tragacanth and gum Arabic are great options to help form the sticks.
5 Simple Steps to Make Herbal Incense
It’s fun to take a day out of your normal routine and spend some time making your own custom “flavoured” incense. Feel free to change up the routine listed here and try new things as it’s not rocket science, and you might enjoy your different results.
Stuff you’ll need:
- Herbal incense base
- Herbal incense bonding agent
- Herbal incense liquid
- Herbal incense A few different bowls
- Blender or mortar/pestle
- Measuring cups
- Spoon
- Wooden cutting board
Step 1. Be sure that the herbs you use have been thoroughly dried out before mixing them up. Combine the herbs of choice, then use either the mortar and pestle or blender to pulverize them into a fine powder.
Step 2: Mix this powder up with whatever it was you chose to use as a base at a ratio of two parts dried herbs to one part base. Eyeball the amount you want to you use according to how many sticks you plan to make!
Step 3: Mix your chosen liquid with your new blended powder in a ratio of three parts liquid to five parts mixture. Liquid is necessary for the process in order to activate your bonding agent and transform it from a powdery-substance to sticky glue.
Step 4: Use the spoons to adhere your bonding agent to the liquid coating. You will end up with a dough-like consistency. Be sure to cover all parts.
Step 5: Bust out your arts and crafts skills and form your incense into shapes. Come up with different shapes you can’t buy in stores like mushrooms, pyramids, snakes! You can always just roll them into natural herbal incense sticks or traditional cones. Lay them on the board to dry and store in airtight containers to keep them fresh.
How to Use Natural Herbal Incense
Once they’ve dried out, they’re ready to go!
Fire up your incense!
If you made the sticks put them into any kind of holder and light the end. If you choose to do a different type of shape, such as cones, place them on small dishes and ignite the top.
If you want to heighten the experience, smoke cannabis while enjoying the aromatherapy put off by your own natural incense sticks. Burning incense also creates a great atmosphere for long hot baths or romantic candle-lit dinners.
