About This Culture: Incense

Incense is used by many Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula. They use it to make their homes and their clothing smell nice! The malls have special shops that sell the best kinds of incense!

My favorite kind of incense that I learned to love right away is frankincense. It has a light, sweet smelling scent. You put it in an incense burner on top of a red hot coal. The picture on the right is an Omani man in his shop selling frankincense and incense burners. The picture below shows the frankincense burning.



Many of my Arab friends use another kind of incense called Bakhoor. It is burned the same way as frankincense, but it is basically a perfumed piece of wood. There are many different varieties, but it usually has a musty scent to it.

All of the weddings that I have been to in the Middle East had incense burning. Often times ladies would carry the burning incense around to the tables so that we could get some of the fragrance on our clothing and in our hair!

Sometimes when I would visit friends they would end the visit by burning incense and getting the fragrance on my clothing. It was a way to honor me for visiting them. It hasn't been as common to do that in our current country, but I know that they still love incense here.

Here's a couple more pictures of frankincense...

This man is putting the frankincense in the incense burner. 

This is a close up picture of the sweet smelling frankincense.