I am from Ireland, and over here, most cigarettes come with filters covered with that brown speckeled paper. Now I’ve been to Spain and Belgium, and there too most cigarettes are the same.
In the US, AFAIK, most cigarettes come with a uniform whiteness, the whole length of the smoke.
Why the difference?
Also, what’s the deal with “Soft Packs” and why can’t I buy them in regular shops here.
My brand is Marlboro Lights, and I love it when any of my friends come back from holidaying in the States and bring me back a carton of Soft pack White marlboro lights.
The filter appearance depends upon the brand. The majority of cigarettes do have your “normal” brown filter. Let’s look at your brand for an example. Marlboro reds and mediums have brown filters, while the lights have a white filter. Why? I don’t know-just to be different?
Camels, my brand back when I smoked(until last month) have brown filters on all their varieties that have filters. You can still buy the unfiltered ones though.
Soft pack, to me, was just a way to have different types of packs. I was a fan of the hard pack myself-it kept them from smashing in my pocket and falling out in my briefcase. I don’t know why you can’t find the soft packs in regular stores over there.
I remember when Marlboro lights came out. Until then very few brands of cigarettes had white filter wrappers. And there were very few light brands on the market, they had a very slim market share, and none of them actually named “Lights” so the all white cigarette was a marketing feature, nothing else.
There was also a brand of cigarrette called More. It was longer and skinnier than regular cigarettes and one of its varietys had ALL BROWN paper.
Ugh. I couldn’t stand them- they tended to go out easily, and just the thought of smoking all that brown dye made my lungs hurt.
In the US, a white filter means that it is a light cigarette. The only light cigarette in the US that has a brown filter, AFAIK, is the Camel Light. It is designed for men who want to smoke a light cigarette, and avoid the stigma that only women smoke white-filtered cigarettes.
I personally never buy white filtered cigarettes, because I always end up lighting the filter end and get a horrible taste in my mouth, and I waste cigarettes. Last month I bought a pack of fancy Winstons, which weren’t lights, but they had a white filter anyway. After lighting several filters on fire, I vowed never to buy white-filter cigarettes again. End of story.
When they first came up with the idea of adding filters to cigarettes, the filters were made of cork. The speckled filter papers are meant to look like cork.
The differences are more complex than any of the posters so far have indicated.
A single brand of cigarette (for argument’s sake, let’s say Winston) will have different colored papers, different markings on the papers, what have you, for its various markets. Military bases (PXs, etc.) may get one style where civilian distributors get another where foreign distributors a third.
My knowledge of this is second-hand, but only second-hand, as it comes from a former co-worker who had previously been an employee of R. J. Reynolds, and who was clear in her recollections of boxing up cigarettes with minor differences in their papers for the various markets sold to.
Sorry I can’t be more lucid on the details. I’ve spent the last several years trying to forget as much about Winston-Salem as I possibly can.
Okay, yet another hearsay post without a definitive answer:
I recall reading a question about this several years ago. The answer to the brown (or cork-tipped) vs. white paper debate was all marketing. As far as gender is concerned, men expressed a preference for brown; women preferred white. This is by no means universal, and of course in a pinch most smokers will take what they can get.
Bughunter wrote:
Bughunter, do I even need to point out the irony of this? You’re inhaling toxic, carcinogenic, burning plant resins with various additives to improve the taste and make it more addictive. And you’re worried about the dye on the paper? Priceless. You should work for RJ Reynolds.
