On Liking Difficult Scents

On Liking Difficult Scents

There is a particular moment that anyone who has explored incense will probably recognise. You open something new — a slim box, a glassine envelope — and the first impression stops you short. Not unpleasant exactly, but unfamiliar in a way that sits just the wrong side of comfortable. The temptation is to set it aside and try something a little easier.

Kasturi gave me one of those moments.

Musk, in the western perfumery tradition, has been so domesticated that most people no longer know the original scent. The musk you encounter in mainstream fragrances — that soft, clean, slightly laundry-inflected warmth — is synthetic and has been for decades. I am grateful for that; natural musk came from the scent pods of the male musk deer, an animal now protected; Indian incense makers once substituted the seeds of the musk mallow plant, though synthetics have largely displaced those too. What has survived in both cases is an idea of musk rather than the thing itself: something safe, familiar, and acceptable.

Kasturi, as it appears in traditional Indian incense, is a different matter. The dominant notes are animalic — earthy, dark, with a faint faecal edge that western noses tend to read as wrong rather than complex. It is heady and a little confronting. It certainly doesn't smell like anyone's fabric conditioner. My first reaction was one of mild disgust.

And yet, repeated exposure did something — not mere habituation, but a gradual recalibration of what I was actually smelling. The earthiness began to resolve into something rich and grounded rather than simply animal. I started to notice the way Kasturi persists and deepens rather than brightening and fading. I noticed its prevalence in Indian incense catalogues — almost every serious maker offers at least one interpretation — and began to understand that it was not an aberration but a foundation: a traditional note in Indian perfumery with centuries of use behind it.

The arc of discovery went something like this: unfamiliar disgust, then curiosity about its ubiquity, then learning to identify its markers, and finally a genuine seeking out and enjoyment. I now approach a well-made Kasturi the way I would any other acquired taste — oat milk, kimchi, a particularly tannic wine — knowing that the difficulty is not incidental to the pleasure but inseparable from it.

This is, I think, what distinguishes difficult scents from merely unpleasant ones. An unpleasant scent stays unpleasant. A difficult scent has depth that requires something of you before it gives something back. The resistance is the point; it marks the distance between a first impression and an understanding.

You may notice throughout this website that I emphasise authentic incense made for the Indian home market. I also keep in mind, however, that incense is predominantly used for relaxation and pleasure — so whilst I don't avoid challenging fragrances, I consciously stock those that will appeal to western tastes. Thankfully, the overlap is considerable.

That said, it is widely observed that western taste has, over the past century or so, moved consistently toward the immediately agreeable: lighter, cleaner, safer. This has produced fragrances of great technical refinement and almost no challenge. Traditional Indian incense — and Kasturi in particular — comes from a different sensibility, one in which depth and complexity are worth the initial effort of adjustment. Whether that effort is worthwhile is, of course, a matter of personal temperament. But for those willing to sit with something unfamiliar long enough to understand it, the rewards tend to outlast anything that pleased immediately.

My own Kasturi favourites are rich, full interpretations — those that embrace the earthiness rather than softening it. They are incenses for evenings, for the quiet hours and stillness in which a complicated scent can properly unfold. I would not have predicted, on first acquaintance, that I would come to love them. That, perhaps, is the most interesting thing about difficult scents: they have the capacity to surprise you about yourself.