Britain’s young people don’t smoke cigarettes as much these days. Since 2011, smoking among teenagers has fallen steadily. Anecdotally, this rings true to me, and it is surely good. Smoking is, as you may have heard, bad for you.
But a study published recently in the journal, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, that suggests something weirder is also going on with young people and tobacco. Apparently, the number of adults in England using non-cigarette tobacco products – things like cigars, pipes and shisha – increased from about 210,000 in early 2020 to a peak of just shy of 1 million in mid-2022, falling back to 773,000 by September last year. What struck me as truly strange, though, was that the most likely group to use these products is young people. About 3.2% of 18-year-olds were smoking these things in September 2023, up from 0.19% in 2013. By contrast, only 1.1% of 65-year-olds were doing so.
Who are these young people huffing on cigars of an afternoon? Where are they? Why are they doing it? The published research doesn’t differentiate between the types of products. Plenty of young people enjoy smoking shisha with their friends. But cigars? The words “young person” and “cigar” do not go together in my mind. Pipes and young people, even less so. When I think of a pipe smoker, I picture an elderly man with a luxuriant white beard sitting on a wooden porch by the sea somewhere in Newfoundland who knows more about fishing tackle than you could ever hope to learn.
But this is an outdated notion, according to Kevin Godbee of US-based Pipes Magazine. “Our number one demographic is 25- to 35-year-olds,” he told me. Still, I was finding it difficult to imagine the kind of person these young pipe smokers might be. If I saw someone in their 20s light up a pipe, it would be a day-defining event. “Maybe they’re looking for something different, they don’t want to do what everybody else is doing,” he said, “there’s a segment of this which is hipsters.”
I did not manage to find any young pipe smokers in England to speak to for this piece, which didn’t surprise me much. What I did find, though, were young cigar smokers. I spoke to a cigar shop owner in Mayfair, who said they have seen an increase in young customers, particularly since Covid, when they were doing a roaring delivery trade. “I would say that probably 30% of our customers are under the age of 30,” he said.
I also spoke to Spencer, a 29-year-old account manager from Manchester, now living in London, with a cigar habit. It’s something he started doing with his father and grandfather on holiday. To him, smoking a cigar is about relaxation, tradition and “an appreciation for the finer things in life”.
He is sceptical, however, of whether other young people are getting into cigars for what he sees as the right reason: being a genuine enthusiast. “I feel like the rise could potentially be linked to the whole social media, viral, TikTok culture that we live in,” he said. Maybe people are looking at rappers such as Drake smoking a cigar, or worse, men’s rights losers such as Andrew Tate, and thinking, that could be me. To my mind, the first image of “person smoking a cigar” is some kind of Wall Street fat cat, but that too is an outdated image. Laurence Fox, in a recently released advert for his new podcast, is smoking a fat cigar into the camera. In certain circles, a cigar says: “I am a rich man and I want you to know it”.
I decided to run a personal, highly unscientific experiment into whether or not smoking a cigar as someone in their early 30s is weird. I went to another cigar shop in Mayfair, which seems to be the heartland of cigars in London, and asked for “a cheap cigar”, not a question that was met with approval. They almost refused to sell me a cheap one because I wouldn’t be getting the best possible cigar experience.
Cheap is a relative term in this world anyway. The most affordable cigar they had on offer was £13, and prices went up into the hundreds from there. The sales assistant gave me a short speech about how cigar tobacco is affected by the terroir, just like wine, and was at pains to make me understand that I was not to inhale the smoke, but could blow it out of my nose if I felt inclined. I listened, knowing I had no intention of ever lighting the cigar, and felt guilty. I ended up with the £13 cigar, a lewdly brown tube with a red and white sticker around one end.
The following day, standing outside a brunch place in Bristol with some friends, I took the cigar out, and a lighter. My friend Tom looked at me.
“Oh, what’s this?” they said, a smile frozen on their face. I told them I smoked cigars now. The smile remained in place, but something else flickered behind their eyes. When I told them it was for a piece, they breathed a sigh of relief. “I was thinking, oh God, is this a new affectation that eventually I’m going to have to talk to her about because it’s cringe,” they said. My friend Thurstan was much less kind. “It would have been as shocking as if you had squatted down and started pissing in the street in the middle of this conversation,” he said, “like, how far is this mob wife thing going, because this is too much.”
Cigar smoking as a young person: still weird, then. Or weird to do outside a restaurant in the morning. Or weird to do as a woman without any other obvious society-defying habits. In any case: on the rise, but not for me.
Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist
