What are the dangers of incense smoke?

[Albert_Rose]

I have done a google search on this subject, but seem to find lots of fun stuff about Wicca, rather than scientific documents. No problem there, but I would still like to know.

Is incense smoke dangerous to my body? How so?

[Masuro]

A Korean incense dealer once told me that if you can’t eat a piece of incense then you shouldn’t light it. I’m not sure how you know if it’s safe to eat but I suppose looking at the ingredients would help. What I’m trying to say in my roundabout way is that organic incense is probably safe to burn but incense made with chemicals should be left on the store shelves.

[Meatros]

I think the fact that it’s smoke might be cause for some concern. I burn a lot of incense (makes the house smell nice), and on occasion I’ve had trouble breathing. The same thing happens when I’m in a crowded bar.

Happy 1000 post!

[Squink]

What I’m trying to say in my roundabout way is that organic incense is probably safe to burn but incense made with chemicals should be left on the store shelves.

Chemicals are chemicals regardless of the source. I like and use incense, but some of those half-oxidized aromatics are probably pretty bad for you; perhaps even worse than, shudder, second hand cigarette smoke.

Lin’s team collected air samples from inside and outside a temple in Tainan
City and compared them to samples at a traffic intersection. Inside the temple, they found very high concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a large group of highly carcinogenic chemicals that are released when certain substances are burnt.
Total levels of PAHs inside the temple were 19 times higher than outside and slightly higher than at the intersection. “Due to poor ventilation in the temples and accumulation from non-stop incense burning, we were not surprised by these results,” says Lin.

-from New Scientist Aug 4, 2001 See this link

[Albert_Rose]

Thanks, everyone! I’ll try to go easy on the incense. I like the sweet-smelling stuff that seems highly manufactured, rather than the strong “college dorm-room” incense.

Thanks for the congratulations, Meatros. I wanted my 1000th to be in GQ, so as to contribute something to the advancement of human knowledge.

[Lynn_Bodoni]

I absolutely LOVE the smell of incense burning. However, as I’ve gotten older and my breathing problems have worsened, I’ve found that I can’t be around the smoke, if I want to be able to breathe. I also can’t tolerate cigarette smoke, but I don’t the smell of it.

So take this anecdotal evidence as you will.

[SC_Wolf]

Particular ingredients can trigger a reaction in someone who’s alergic to that substance, and the kicker is, because the ingredients aren’t always common, you might not even know you’re alergic untill you light up, and start feeling your throat close up.

In my household, we quickly made the discovery that burning anything with sage in it will trigger my reaction. Now if we hadn’t happened to be burning sage by itself and noticed that I got the same reaction as I did with certain incense sticks, it may have taken a lot more trial and error to narrow down the ingredient that I was alergic to.

On a wholely unrelated note, smoke particles are smaller than dust particles by a couple orders of magnitude, which means they can get into any electronics that you have in the house that much easier. If you have more than an incidental ammount of smoke in your environment, from candle burning, incense burning, having a smoker in the household, having the coughcough other kind of smoker in the household, then you may want to open your electronics up and give them a blast of compressed air every once in a while.