Cigarette Brand Guides & Buying Notes
Brand notes, buying guides and dispatch updates. Written for people who already know what they smoke and want the detail a product page cannot carry — how a format differs from its neighbour, what actually changes between two tar ratings, and what to expect when a carton arrives.
- All 96
- Brand Comparisons 11
- Buying Guides 31
- Japanese & Korean Cigarettes 15
- Menthol Cigarettes 12
- Prices & Duty Free 21
- Smoking Culture 6
The Strongest Menthol Cigarettes by Style
Strongest splits into two different questions, and buyers usually mean one without realising the other exists. Do you want the most tobacco, or the most menthol? The…
Japanese vs Korean Cigarettes: The Differences
The two markets look similar from outside — both fine-cut, both bright-leaf-forward, both lighter and cleaner than the American style — and they are more different t…
Do Cigarettes Expire?
There is no expiry date printed on a cigarette pack anywhere in the US, and that is not an oversight. Tobacco is not a perishable food, and regulators do not require…
Charcoal Filters in Cigarettes: What They Do
Japanese cigarettes often carry a visible dark band in the filter, and the pack will say "charcoal filter" in English. It is a real piece of engineering, not marketi…
How to Read a Cigarette Tax Stamp
The small printed band across the end of a cigarette carton is the single most informative object on the package, and most buyers never look at it. It is a tax recei…
Newport vs Marlboro Menthol: Two Different Ideas
These two are compared constantly and they are not really competitors in the way people assume. Newport is a menthol brand. Marlboro is a full-flavour brand that als…
What Is a Carton of Cigarettes, Exactly?
"Carton" is one of those words that everyone in tobacco uses and nobody defines. It is a unit of sale, a unit of taxation, and a unit of shipping all at once, and th…
Hard Pack vs Soft Pack: The Difference That Matters
Two packs, same brand, same cigarettes, different box. The soft pack is the older format — a paper sleeve with foil inside, folding at the top. The hard pack, or box…
King Size vs 100s: What Actually Changes
The difference sounds trivial — 85mm versus 100mm — and in a sense it is. But the extra 15 millimetres change the draw, the burn time, and the price, and they change…
How to Tell If Cigarettes Are Real
Counterfeit cigarettes are a real market, and the fakes have got better. The old tells — a badly printed logo, a flimsy box — no longer reliably separate real from f…
How to Store Cigarettes So They Stay Fresh
Tobacco is an agricultural product, and it behaves like one. It holds a target moisture level, it loses aromatic compounds over time, and it responds badly to heat a…
How Long Does a Carton Last?
There are two different questions hiding inside this one. How long does a carton last as a supply — how many days of smoking it represents — and how long does it las…