Direct answer: Ten tags organize the 150 botanical materials catalogued in this reference: woody, resinous, sweet, herbal, spicy, floral, citrus, earthy, smoky, balsamic. A tag names a shared smell character rather than a plant group, which is why one material can carry several and one tag can gather woods, resins, blossoms, and roots together. Membership is published as a machine-readable dataset; what follows is the readable version of it.
Key facts: Membership lives in aroma.json, a Schema.org Dataset on data.incenseherbs.com. Each tag is a DefinedTerm, and its memberIngredients array names the materials that carry it, by slug. Character only: no grade, no medical claim, no species guarantee.
Key Takeaways
- Ten tags: woody, resinous, sweet, herbal, spicy, floral, citrus, earthy, smoky, balsamic.
- Membership is not exclusive. Agarwood carries three tags, patchouli four, vetiver three.
- The ten lists name 54 memberships between them. That is a curated canon, not a tag on all 150 entities.
- Two families are deliberately tiny: smoky has one member, citrus has two.
- A family says what a material smells like. It says nothing about species, grade, origin, or price.
The Map in One Table
| Family | Chinese | Character | Count | Canonical members |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Woody | 木香 | dry, warm, clean, creamy-soft | 9 | agarwood, benzoin, cedar, orange-peel, patchouli, sandalwood, vetiver, borneol, pine-resin |
| Resinous | 树脂香 | sticky, deep, gum-resin | 4 | agarwood, frankincense, pine-resin, sweetgum |
| Sweet | 甜香 | sugared, honeyed, rounded | 14 | agarwood, benzoin, cedar, chrysanthemum, cinnamon, jasmine, orange-peel, osmanthus, rose, sandalwood, angelica, calamus, sweetgum, ambergris |
| Herbal | 草本香 | green, grassy, bitter-green | 4 | chrysanthemum, mugwort, angelica, calamus |
| Spicy | 辛香 | warm, clove-and-cinnamon heat | 5 | cinnamon, clove, patchouli, angelica, calamus |
| Floral | 花香 | blossom, honeyed, heady | 4 | chrysanthemum, jasmine, osmanthus, rose |
| Citrus | 柑橘香 | bright, zesty, lemony | 2 | frankincense, orange-peel |
| Earthy | 土香 | rooty, soil-like, grounded | 6 | frankincense, myrrh, patchouli, vetiver, calamus, ambergris |
| Smoky | 烟香 | charred, burnt-wood | 1 | vetiver |
| Balsamic | 香脂香 | sweet-resinous, vanilla-amber | 5 | benzoin, myrrh, patchouli, pine-resin, sweetgum |
Read the count column before the member column. Nine woody entries against one smoky entry tells you something about the tradition’s center of gravity: aromatic wood is where Chinese incense spent most of its attention. The short lists are not afterthoughts — they mark characters that one material carries so distinctly that adding a second would blur the tag.
What a Family Measures
Direct answer: A family measures smell character, not botanical kinship — which is why a grass root can be woody and a gum can be citrus.
A family is a sensory grouping. That single decision explains most of the map’s oddities.
Botany sorts by lineage: a grass belongs with grasses, a resin with the tree that wept it. The ten families sort by what reaches the nose. Vetiver is a root from a grass, and it lands in woody because it smells of dry wood and earth. Frankincense is a hardened gum, and it lands in citrus because its top carries a lemon-bright edge. Neither placement is a mistake; both would be impossible under a botanical scheme.
The practical consequence is that a family tag survives changes that a species name does not. Two different trees can both read as resinous; one species can read differently depending on which part is used, how it was dried, and whether it is heated or lit. The tag describes the material in use, not the plant on a herbarium sheet.
This is why the map is useful to a blender or a buyer and less useful to a botanist. A blender asks what a material contributes to a mixture. A family answers that question directly. A genus name does not.
The naming trap
Family words are ordinary English words, which makes them easy to misread as claims. “Woody” does not mean the material is wood; vetiver and patchouli are both tagged woody and neither is. “Floral” does not mean the material is a flower; chrysanthemum appears there, but so does the language of blossom applied to materials that are not blossoms. “Citrus” does not mean the material is a citrus fruit; frankincense earns the tag through its opening, not its botany.
Treat each tag as an adjective about smell, not a noun about origin. Once that clicks, the overlap between families stops looking like sloppy taxonomy and starts looking like accurate description.
The Ten, Grouped by What They Do in a Blend
Ten definitions in a row read like a glossary. Grouped by function, they read like a toolkit.
The wood core: woody and resinous
Woody holds nine members and supplies the spine of most classical blends: agarwood, sandalwood, cedar, patchouli, vetiver, borneol, benzoin, orange-peel, pine-resin. The register is dry, warm, and clean, running from sandalwood’s creamy softness to cedar’s pencil-box sharpness. Full treatment on the woody family page.
Resinous is the shorter, heavier list: agarwood, frankincense, pine-resin, sweetgum. Gum materials soften under heat instead of burning like wood, and their scent sits low and sticky. In a mixture they are the floor — the part still present an hour after the opening has gone. The resinous family page takes them one at a time.
The distinction between the two matters when you buy. A “woody” label promises a dry wood register; a “resinous” label promises gum and depth. A stick can be both, and the better ones usually are, but the words point at different experiences.
The sweeteners and the fixatives: sweet and balsamic
Sweet is the widest list at fourteen: agarwood, benzoin, cedar, chrysanthemum, cinnamon, jasmine, orange-peel, osmanthus, rose, sandalwood, angelica, calamus, sweetgum, ambergris. It spans resins, flowers, and woods because sweetness is a quality that many materials carry in passing. Benzoin’s vanilla, osmanthus’s apricot-honey, and rose’s perfume are three different sugars.
Balsamic holds five: benzoin, myrrh, patchouli, pine-resin, sweetgum. The tag is narrower than sweet — it means sweet and resinous at once, the vanilla-amber register that glues a composition together and slows its evaporation. A balsamic material is usually also sweet, and often resinous; the tag picks out the ones that do both jobs.
The green and the warm: herbal and spicy
Herbal covers four: chrysanthemum, mugwort, angelica, calamus. Green, grassy, sometimes bitter, with mugwort’s camphoraceous edge as the extreme case. This is the family that keeps a blend from feeling heavy — a small amount of a green note lifts a resinous base without adding sweetness.
Spicy covers five: cinnamon, clove, patchouli, angelica, calamus. Warm, penetrating, sometimes hot. Cinnamon and clove are the obvious members; patchouli’s inclusion is the interesting one, because its spicy edge is what makes it read as more than a damp leaf. Use sparingly: spicy notes dominate a mixture faster than any other family.
The blossom and the peel: floral and citrus
Floral has four: chrysanthemum, jasmine, osmanthus, rose. Blossom, honey, and in jasmine’s case a heady indolic weight. This is largely a modern or symbolic layer on a canon built from woods and resins, which is why floral blends often need a wood floor to feel finished. The floral family page goes deeper.
Citrus has two: frankincense and orange-peel. Bright, zesty, short. The family is small because true citrus materials are few in the classical palette, and because a citrus note is a top note by nature — it opens a blend and then leaves. Anyone expecting citrus to carry a long session has misread the family’s role.
The ground and the smoke: earthy and smoky
Earthy holds six: frankincense, myrrh, patchouli, vetiver, calamus, ambergris. Rooty, soil-like, dark. These are base materials: they anchor, they last, and they supply the sense of ground under everything else.
Smoky holds exactly one: vetiver. Charred, burnt-wood, unmistakable. The single-member family is the map’s sharpest editorial statement — this character is so specific that one material defines it, and no second member would add information.
Three Materials That Prove the Method
The overlap is not a defect to be explained away. It is the method working.
| Material | Families | What the overlap shows |
|---|---|---|
| Agarwood | woody, resinous, sweet | The deepest material in the canon is also the most layered: dry wood, gum, and a late sweetness arriving in that order |
| Patchouli | woody, spicy, earthy, balsamic | A leafy herb that reads as rooted wood — four tags because it behaves like four things at once |
| Vetiver | woody, earthy, smoky | One root spanning the ground and the smoke; the only member of the smallest family |
| Frankincense | resinous, citrus, earthy | A gum with a bright opening and a mineral base — the clearest case of a material refusing one label |
Take any of these four and try to place it in a single family. The exercise fails, and the failure is the lesson: blends are composed from characters, not from tags. A tag is a starting coordinate, not a box.
Which Families Share Members
Overlap is not scattered at random. Count the shared names pairwise and the map’s internal structure appears: the wood-and-sugar join is the densest in the dataset, and the two tiny families barely join anything at all.
| Pair | Shared members | Count | What the pairing buys a blend |
|---|---|---|---|
| woody + sweet | agarwood, benzoin, cedar, orange-peel, sandalwood | 5 | The round-bodied wood register — dry spine with sugar on it |
| sweet + floral | chrysanthemum, jasmine, osmanthus, rose | 4 | Blossoms that carry their own honey, so no separate sweetener is needed |
| woody + balsamic | benzoin, patchouli, pine-resin | 3 | A wood floor that also fixes the top notes |
| sweet + spicy | angelica, calamus, cinnamon | 3 | Warmth with sweetness behind it, the profile of a winter blend |
| sweet + herbal | angelica, calamus, chrysanthemum | 3 | Green notes that do not read as bitter |
| woody + resinous | agarwood, pine-resin | 2 | The narrow bridge between dry wood and gum |
Read the counts as structure, not merit. Five shared names between woody and sweet means the two tags describe neighbouring experiences, which is why so many classical formulas move easily between them. Two shared names between woody and resinous means the bridge exists but is narrow: agarwood and pine-resin are the only materials that sit on both sides.
The absent rows are as informative as the present ones. Smoky and citrus never appear in this table, because a family with one or two members cannot share two names with anything. Their isolation is structural, and it is the reason a substitution search that starts from those tags has nowhere to go.
Counting the Map
Add the ten counts and you get 54 memberships. That number is worth pausing on.
There are 150 entities in ingredients.json. Fifty-four memberships across ten lists means the family lists are a curated canon — the materials the reference considers representative for each character — rather than a tag applied to every entity in the dataset. The distinction matters in two directions.
First, absence from a list is not evidence of absence of character. A material missing from the woody list may still read woody; check its own aroma field before ruling it out. Second, presence in a list is not a ranking. The lists are not ordered by quality, price, or importance, and the count of a family is not a measure of its worth. Sweet has fourteen entries because sweetness is common, not because sweet materials are better.
What the counts do reveal is emphasis. Nine woody members and fourteen sweet members against one smoky and two citrus tell you where the tradition invested its attention: in woods, resins, and the sweet materials that round them. The narrow families are narrow because the palette itself is narrow there, not because the reference ran out of room.
Family Is Not Grade
Direct answer: A tag locates a smell; it never certifies a material — grade, species, and authenticity sit outside this map.
The most expensive mistake a new buyer makes is treating a family tag as a quality signal.
| Question | A family tag answers it | A family tag cannot |
|---|---|---|
| What does it smell like? | Yes — the character, in one word | Distinguish a fine piece from a poor one |
| Which species is it? | No | Replace a species name, origin, or harvest note |
| Is it good? | No | Stand in for grading, testing, or inspection |
| What does it do in a blend? | Partly — its role follows from character | Predict how it behaves with a specific partner material |
| Is it real or synthetic? | No | Verify that the label describes the contents |
A tag is a coordinate. Coordinates tell you where you are; they do not tell you whether the neighbourhood is any good. Buyers who conflate the two end up paying agarwood prices for a woody-smelling blend, or dismissing a modest sandalwood because it was not tagged resinous.
How the Tags Combine in a Blend
Classical Chinese compounding — 合香 (hexiang, blended incense) — is built on roles rather than on families, and the roles map onto the tags neatly enough to be useful.
A base material → slow release → a floor that persists → lighter notes ride on it → the composition holds its shape over an hour. That is the mechanical reason a resinous or balsamic material so often anchors a formula: not tradition alone, but the physics of evaporation. Sandalwood, agarwood, benzoin, and myrrh all do this job.
A top material → fast release → an opening that announces the blend → then steps back → the base becomes what remains. Citrus and the lighter florals are the usual candidates. Without a top, a blend can feel mute for the first minutes; with too much, it shouts and then vanishes.
A modifier → a small dose of contrast → a green or spicy edge → the blend stops reading as one flat note. Herbal and spicy materials work here, in quantities small enough that you notice the difference without being able to name it. The classical vocabulary for these roles is 君臣佐使 (chief, minister, assistant, guide), and the hexiang blending system treats it at length.
The map does not replace that system. It supplies the raw character information the system assumes you already have.
Reading a Label Through the Map
A label usually gives you a name, a family word, and a mood. The map lets you test all three against each other.
- Check the noun. “Sandalwood” is a material claim; “sandalwood aroma” is a character claim. Only the first promises a species.
- Place the family word. If the label says woody and the material is a flower, one of the two is doing marketing work.
- Look for a second tag. Good descriptions often name two characters — “resinous and sweet” is more informative than “deep”, because it tells you how the material behaves in a blend.
- Ask what is missing. No species, no origin, no format: the silence tells you the page is selling an impression.
- Smell before you generalize. One stick of a material teaches you more about its family than three paragraphs.
That last step is the one people skip. The map is a hypothesis about what a material will smell like; the material is the test.
Substitution Within and Across Families
When a material runs out, the map shortens the search: look for a neighbour in the same family first, then a neighbour in an adjacent family, and accept that something will change.
| If you want | First choice | Cross-family backup | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| a dry wood spine | sandalwood | cedar, or vetiver | cedar is sharper and drier; vetiver adds a smoky edge |
| resinous depth | frankincense | pine-resin, or sweetgum | pine reads sharper; sweetgum is sweeter and more balsamic |
| honeyed sweetness | benzoin | osmanthus, or sweetgum | osmanthus brings blossom; sweetgum brings resin |
| a bright opening | orange-peel | frankincense | less sharp, more resinous, and it lasts longer |
| a green lift | mugwort | chrysanthemum | gentler, with less of the camphor edge |
| a warm bite | cinnamon | clove, or patchouli | clove is hotter and drier; patchouli is earthier |
| an amber fixative | myrrh | benzoin | benzoin is sweeter and less earthy |
| a smoky edge | vetiver | nothing canonical | no member to swap in; smoke has to come from format |
The last row is the useful one. A single-member family has no substitute, which is exactly why the tag exists: it marks a character the palette cannot reproduce elsewhere. Every other row offers a workable stand-in at the cost of a describable shift.
Worked Pairs
Two materials, one idea: pair across the axis rather than within it. A heavy partner and a light one give a blend somewhere to travel.
Osmanthus over sandalwood. The apricot-honey of osmanthus opens, then hands over to sandalwood’s creamy base. Sweet and floral above, woody below: the classic shape of a modern Chinese blend, and a forgiving one for beginners because both materials are quiet.
Frankincense with myrrh. Two resins, one bright and one earthy. Frankincense supplies the opening and the lift; myrrh supplies the floor and the amber weight. Their families overlap on resinous and earthy, which is what lets them sit together without competing.
Cinnamon with patchouli. Spicy above, earthy below. The danger is dose: cinnamon dominates within seconds, so it belongs at the top of a formula in a small amount, with patchouli carrying the body. Get the ratio wrong and the blend reads as one hot note.
Vetiver under sandalwood. Smoke under cream. Vetiver’s charred quality is strong enough that a little goes a long way; sandalwood softens it without hiding it. This pair is the fastest way to learn what the smoky family contributes, because the contrast is immediate.
None of these pairs is a formula. They are demonstrations of the map’s logic: pick a character for the top, pick a character for the base, check that the tags do not fight.
The Data Layer Behind the Map
This page is a rendering of records, not a freehand essay. Knowing the shape of those records tells you what you can check and what you cannot.
aroma.json is published as a Schema.org Dataset. Inside it, each family is a DefinedTerm — a named concept with an identifier — and its memberIngredients array lists the materials that belong to it by slug. That structure is why the counts on this page are exact rather than approximate: they are the lengths of those arrays.
The same tags appear a second time, on the entity side. Every ingredient record carries an aroma field naming the families it belongs to, and that field feeds the page’s meta description and its DefinedTerm markup. Two places, one vocabulary — which is what keeps a family page and a material page from drifting apart.
Two companion datasets complete the picture. ingredients.json holds the 150 entity records. relationships.json holds 806 typed edges between entities, including the aroma links that connect materials sharing a character. Read together, they turn a list of names into a graph: families on one side, materials on the other, edges carrying the evidence.
What the layer does not contain matters as much. There is no grade field, no authenticity flag, and no price. Those questions are outside this dataset by design, which is why the map should never be cited as proof of quality.
A Worked Reading: Two Labels Side by Side
Two imaginary labels show how the map earns its keep. Both are the kind of text a shop page prints.
Label one: “Deep Woody Oud — a warm, resinous woody aroma with a sweet balsamic base.” Four family adjectives, one of them a material claim in disguise. Woody, resinous, and balsamic are a coherent stack for agarwood, so the description is internally consistent. What it does not say is which species, where it came from, or whether the material is present at all: “oud aroma” describes a character, not a substance.
Label two: “Sandalwood, cedar, benzoin — 40 sticks.” Three material nouns, no mood words, a format, and a count. The family stack is woody, woody, sweet-balsamic, which tells you the blend has a dry spine with a sweet floor. Every claim here can be checked against the contents.
The comparison gives a rule that outranks any single tag: a stack of family adjectives tells you what a blend is trying to smell like, and only material nouns tell you what is in it. Buyers who read the first as if it were the second are the ones who end up disappointed by a product that smells exactly as described.
Where the Map Stops
Direct answer: The map is a curated canon with three hard limits: it is not a census, it does not grade, and it makes no therapeutic claim.
Three limits are worth stating plainly.
It is a canon, not a census. Fifty-four memberships do not cover 150 entities, and they were never meant to. Use the per-entity aroma field for the full picture.
It describes character, not effect. No family tag implies a therapeutic outcome, and the reference makes no medical claims. Terms like calming or grounding are descriptions of aroma, not promises about a body. The scent guide handles the same boundary from the material side.
It does not grade. Family membership says nothing about species, age, resin density, or authenticity. Those belong to separate references — the knowledge map shows where.
The Chinese Names Beside Each Family
Each tag carries a Chinese gloss: 木香 for woody, 树脂香 for resinous, 甜香 for sweet, 草本香 for herbal, 辛香 for spicy, 花香 for floral, 柑橘香 for citrus, 土香 for earthy, 烟香 for smoky, 香脂香 for balsamic.
The glosses are useful even if you do not read Chinese, because they show how the categories were built. 香 (xiāng) is the shared suffix — incense, fragrance, aroma — and each prefix names the source of the character: 木 wood, 树脂 resin, 甜 sweet, 草 herb, 辛 pungent, 花 blossom, 柑橘 citrus, 土 earth, 烟 smoke, 香脂 balsam. Reading down the list is reading a taxonomy of sources, which is exactly what a scent family is.
Translation loses something here. “Balsamic” in English suggests vinegar to some readers; 香脂香 says fragrant fat or fragrant resin, which is closer to the material reality. When a tag and its gloss disagree in feel, trust the material, then the gloss, then the English word.
FAQ
Q: How many aroma families does this reference use?
Ten. Each is a DefinedTerm in aroma.json with a member list by slug: woody, resinous, sweet, herbal, spicy, floral, citrus, earthy, smoky, balsamic. The count is a design choice, not a natural law — ten covers the classical palette without forcing distinctions that the materials do not support.
Q: Can one ingredient belong to more than one family?
Yes, and several do. Agarwood is woody, resinous, and sweet. Patchouli is woody, spicy, earthy, and balsamic. Vetiver is woody, earthy, and smoky. Frankincense is resinous, citrus, and earthy. A material with layers carries several tags because each tag names a different part of the experience, not a different material.
Q: What separates resinous from balsamic?
Resinous is the physical character of gum-resin: sticky, deep, aromatic when warmed — frankincense and pine resin are the clear cases. Balsamic is the sweet-resinous register specifically: benzoin’s vanilla, myrrh’s amber, sweetgum’s syrup. Most balsamic materials also carry a resinous or sweet tag — benzoin is woody and sweet, pine-resin is resinous, sweetgum is sweet — while myrrh holds balsamic with earthy alone. The tag exists to mark the materials where sugar and resin arrive together, because that combination is what makes a fixative.
Q: Which families are the smallest, and why?
Smoky has one member (vetiver) and citrus has two (frankincense, orange-peel). Both are narrow by design. Smoky is a charred character that one material carries so distinctly that a second member would blur the tag. Citrus is a top-note character, and the classical palette contains very few true citrus materials — the brightness usually comes from an opening rather than from a fruit.
Q: Does a family tag tell me anything about quality or price?
No. Tags describe character. Species, origin, resin density, age, and authenticity sit outside the map entirely, and price follows those factors rather than the family. A sweet material can be cheap or costly; a resinous tag says nothing about grade. Treat the tag as a coordinate and grade as a separate question, asked with separate evidence.
Sources
- Membership and counts: the ten
DefinedTermrecords inaroma.json(dataset), each carrying amemberIngredientsarray. - Entity coverage: the 150 records in
ingredients.json(dataset), checked against thearomafield on individual material pages. - Cross-links: the typed edges in
relationships.json(dataset), 806 of them, including the aroma joins used above.
Related Resources
- Woody family — the backbone, treated material by material.
- Resinous family — gums, depth, and the fixative role.
- Floral family — the modern layer on a classical canon.
- Incense Scent Wheel — the same palette arranged by atmosphere instead of by character.
- Scent guide — the long-form material reference behind these tags.
- Knowledge map — where the datasets, family pages, and entity pages connect.
Natural next step: pick one material you own, look up its tags, and check whether the blend you would build from them matches what the material actually does. Start with the woody family, where the map is densest.
Summary
Ten families, one idea: group materials by the character they contribute, not by the plant they came from. That is why agarwood sits in three families, vetiver in three, patchouli in four, and why the smallest families — smoky with one member, citrus with two — are as informative as the largest.
Three cautions keep the map honest. Membership is curated, not exhaustive: 54 memberships across 150 entities, with the per-entity aroma field as the fuller record. A tag is a coordinate, not a grade, and it never substitutes for species, origin, or inspection. And character is description, not effect — the map says what a material smells like and how it behaves in a blend, and it stops there.