Smoking is a fine hobby and possibly the most constructive of all. When was the last time collecting buttons or old crisp packets killed an old person?

The other day I came to a stark crossroads. At some point in your life you may be forced to change brands due to a number of reasons. These range from poverty to unavailability to being a big fucking pussy when your unfiltered branch of tobacco causes you to cough up something that resembles a mouse..

I hereby present some helpful reviews as I couldn't find anyone else advocating diversifying your smoking for some reason. I have finally found a niche market.

I will be responsible though and say that if you are twelve and thinking of taking up smoking... STOP... Steal some cigarettes from relatives first to find out if you like them. Otherwise you'll just be out of pocket. Oh, and remember... the first one might make you sick but it gets a LOT better.

Dunhill

Overview:

            A favoured duty-free friend… and then something that makes you go “I’m not paying that much” when you try and buy them in the UK.

Price:

Depending on what a bastard the person in the shop is – Anywhere up to 5.99 a pack. 

Packaging:

            Red with gold trim or red with silver trim depending on where you get them from.  Red with silver trim makes you feel a bit less like a Renaissance whore.  They come in the flatter, wider, two-cigarette deep packs that don’t fit very well in a lot of pockets.

Flavour:

            Quite reasonable, at least as far as the near universal and always bland “American Blend” cigarette varieties go.  As with most cigarettes after about four hundred in a row you might as well be smoking your own hair though.

            Defining their actual flavour doesn’t really get much beyond “like a normal cigarette but better”.  Your mouth will still taste like something’s shat in it every morning though.

            When you cough up a Dunhill you can taste flowers.  Also you can taste approaching poverty.

In Summation:

            Ridiculously priced for what they are, they will at least make you feel like you’re at least losing a lung in a vaguely dignified fashion. 

Rating: 7/10

Gitanes Filtre

Overview:

            More French than beating your children with a broken wine bottle to speed their grape crushing.

Price:

            About fifty quid for a couple of hundred from the bloke off the internet up in Preston who sends them via post and is a living god and who should fucking charge less.  

Packaging:

            Blue with white lettering and a picture of a woman with a handbag being hit by a Tsunami.

Flavour:

            Ah, the French varieties of cigarettes.  Every puff reminds you of the first time you learnt that cigars should not be inhaled.  You will experience a warm, wet, gulp of tar every time and you will love it…  You will love it after you’ve smoked them for several weeks and finally start to feel slightly less like you’re dying.  

            It is the taste of manhood.  Possibly of a yak’s manhood.  It has a flavour that, if you’re a girl or a creative writing student, will give you an urge to dress in black, possibly wear a beret, and become an insufferable wanker.  You will listen to French music, look up the translation on Google, and then tell everyone what it means when you play it to them.

            If you’re an actual human being you will just sigh contentedly and then realise that you don’t have the lung capacity to sigh anymore.

            Gitanes have caused me to cough up the most spectacular displays witnessed outside of pneumonia.  You are guaranteed a hearty, oak-flavoured explosion that will burst through your fingers like Mount Etna burst through Pompeii.  Always carry a rag with you.

            The one other thing guaranteed with Gitanes is that you will wake up feeling the worst you will have ever felt in your life and your mouth will be a sulphurous pit of stale nicotine and rotting flesh. 

In summation:

            Oh god yes.

Rating: 9/10

Gauloises Disque Bleu:

Overview:

OH GOD YES.

Price:

No longer in fucking stock… rumours of some kind of ban… Not fucking happy.

Packaging:

            Painfully absent.

Everything else:

They are basically identical to the Gitanes but with a general impression that the people making them actually want you to live a little longer.  You can actually breathe when you wake up in the morning… just.

Rating: 10/10

Marlboro Menthols:

Overview:

            Only smoked by students, scum, and people with chest and throat infections.

Price:

Fuck knows.  Let’s just say £45.99 for 200.

Packaging:

            The usual Marlboro packaging but green instead of red. 

Flavour:

            Even through a severe throat infection they will taste like a koala shit smeared in Vaporub.  There is a vague hint of tobacco in there as well but once you’re able to taste that you know that you’re getting better and can start smoking proper cigarettes again.  You will then offer any remaining cigarettes in the packets to people who’ve never had one before just to ruin their evening.

            The flavour of what I coughed up last time I had a prolonged exposure to menthols was of blood and what I firmly believe to be a piece of lung.  I had to pick it out the sink because it wouldn’t go down the plughole.

In Summation:

            If prone to chest infections with tonsillitis or pharyngitis you will know that sadly these can occasionally be a necessity if you wish to “smoke the fucker out”.  Any human being caught smoking them otherwise should be dragged behind a fucking car.

Rating: 7/10 as a replacement for antibiotics.  0/10 for any single other second of your life.

Sovereigns

Overview:

One rung up the ladder.  Rumoured to be made with the stuff they sweep up off the floor after making Bensons.  The starter cigarette of limited choice for many.

Price:

            Er… I think somewhere around 42.99 for 200… don’t quote me on that.

Packaging:

            Black box with gold lettering and the picture of a something out of Harry Fucking Potter.

Flavour:

            While less offensive than the Sterlings, these cigarettes have the unfortunate by-product of leaving the thickest layer of unpleasantness on your mouth of any cigarette I’ve ever smoked.  After five packs you will, without fail, buy slightly more expensive cigarettes.

            There is much to be said for a relatively budget-priced cigarette that is just about smokeable in the long-term.  Not all that can be said is positive.  The flavour will slowly grow to resemble licking the inside of a tramp’s cheek after a week.

            The phlegm coughed up as a result of prolonged exposure has a tangy, zesty, flavour akin to a severe chest infection.

In Summation:

            Truly a bog-standard cigarette in all ways.  A stop-gap measure at best.  They will ease you through short periods of semi-poverty and not make you feel like you’re the scum of the Earth.  You will, however, be mistaken for a fifteen year-old if you take the box out in public.

Rating: 5/10

Meh.

Sterling Red Superkings:

Overview:

The definition of last resort… a fucking monstrosity representing apparent value for money for those crises of conscience when saving a fiver per 200 really seems more important than self-respect, enjoyment and your lungs.

Price:

£39.99 for 200.

Packaging:

Silver with coloured patches designating quite which horrible variety you’re getting.

Flavour:

Sterling cigarettes instantly take the smoker back to times they’d rather forget.  More specifically it takes them back to times when they have sorted through the ashtrays for elderly dog-ends to roll into one tar-drenched desperation cigarette.  As we all know the end result of such a squalid effort is actually worse than the shame it brings.

The smoke manages to be both weak and yet still deeply offensive to the palette.  Over the course of a pack you will find a dreadful aftertaste and thick fur building on your tongue that will prove resistant to any fluid or most violent scraping.  Even when you come to your senses and buy a pack of decent cigarettes the flavour will remain as both a vile literal and mental aftertaste.

In each cough there are hints of wet dog, willow bark, moss, and all the insects and parasites that live within such things.

In Summation:

A cigarette should make you contented and not lead you to scratch at your wrists with a broken beer bottle. 

Rating:  1/10

They get a point because they are at least long enough to make you realise your mistake after only one cigarette.  I respect that kind of honesty even if it’s akin to pointing out someone is “really ugly” in a room full of blind people. 

Russian Bootleg Gauloise Reds/Russian Bootleg every single variety on the website.

Overview:

            The Cold War’s not over.

Price:

            $15 for 200.

Packaging:

            Fairly similar to the actual brand you thought you were buying but with the “R’s” backwards on the warning labels.

Flavour:

            Oh sweet fuck… Oh sweet fuck… Oh Sweet Fuck…

            It’s like someone picked up fistfuls of a student’s laundry and then swirled it in the communal toilet.  Then they rolled it in the single towel that is shared by nine people with twelve different STDs.  Then they shoved it up their arses and did squat thrusts just out of sheer fucking spite.

            I admit that once I may have used the phrase “it’s a cigarette… quite how badly could they fuck that up?”  I accept now that I may have deserved the resultant lesson.  Sheer words cannot describe how purely horrible these cigarettes were.  I wanted to reach down my throat and claw the lining from my lungs with my fingernails just to rid myself of the taste.

            In retrospect I should have just gone out and bought some more cigarettes… but that was… you know… outside.

            You don’t cough up anything with these other than pure, cringing pain.  You will feel that stabbing that makes you think “you know… maybe antibiotics might be a good idea after all…” 

In Summation:

            Absolute proof of the existence of evil.

Rating: 1/10 for the sheer comedy of making strangers smoke them and know that you have just stolen a year of their life and a piece of their soul.

Ziganov Black

Overview:

            Treading a thin line between wankery and genius.  Ridiculously expensive.  Makes you feel like either a beatnik, a Tsar, or, in my case, Rasputin.

Price:

            £6.99 a fucking pack… Bastards.

Packaging:

            For the horrific amount of money you’ve just spent you get a black hinged box with silver foil trim and white lettering.  This alone will probably get you beaten in most pubs.  The fact the actual cigarettes themselves are, if not black, at the very least a very dark brown will not help either.  There’s a shiny silver Ziganov and a thin silver band just above the filter.

Flavour:

            Okay… the fact that I got the pack because I was grumpy and was ordering more Gitanes meant that I didn’t approach the challenge with the cleanest of palettes.  My tongue resembles the carpet of a hen-party limo at the end of an evening in Blackpool.

            Still, the bits I could taste were quite pleasant.  Flavour-wise it hovered somewhere between the American and French blends, sadly a little more in the direction of the American.  I was half-expecting something that tasted like the bootleg Russian Gauloises Reds.  I was pleasantly surprised.  I am also now trying to find a way to justify spending more on cigarettes in a week than I do on food in a fortnight.

            Nothing too rigorous in the coughing stakes, especially once I’d cleared out the Gitanes.  I couldn’t afford enough to find out how rough you feel after a few solid weeks of them though.

In Summation:

            Really fucking expensive… but… look at me… I’m smoking a black-ish cigarette… I’d almost look cool if the rest of me didn’t look like a wanker.

            Sigh… I’m conflicted.

Rating: 9/10 based off one packet and not looking at the bank balance.

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