A cool & tasty hand-roll (Zig-Zag Slim Menthol Filter Tips)

Member Name: GentleGenius

Product:	Zig-Zag Slim Menthol Filter Tips
Date:	18/05/09 (233 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, easy to use, strong menthol blast

Disadvantages: Being a smoker in the first place

COST: 75p per pack of 150, or £5 for a box of 10 individual packs, at a fancy goods & bric-a-brac stall in a market-type arcade close to where I live.

DISCLAIMER: This isn't a pro-smoking article - it's merely a review on a product.

Ever since the damned day I first became hooked on cigarettes at the tender age of 18 (older than some of my peers), I've always smoked menthols. The "Consulate, Cool As A Mountain Stream" advert of the 1960s sure got inside my head, and I have always, from day one, been a menthol ciggie smoker. I can't actually smoke ordinary, non-menthol cigarettes as they do nothing at all for me other than send me into explosive coughing fits, and make my head spin.

Back in 2006, I was made redundant from my very well-paying secretarial job in London, and decided to (at a much reduced salary) work from home, self-employed. I had to make a tremendous amount of cutbacks in my expenditure, and tried very hard on a number of occasions after my redundancy to quit the weed, but without any degree of success whatsoever. I did manage to stop drinking alcohol after having been a fairly heavy user, and that helped with the pennies quite a lot - but something needed to be done about the smoking. If I couldn't quit, then I needed to find a different, and much cheaper way of doing it.

Several of my friends urged me to roll my own, but I claimed that I couldn't, as it's the menthol I need more than the nicotine, and how on earth could I smoke menthol ciggies if I was rolling them myself? The answer came in a blaze of glory from my friend Rosemarie.... "well, did you know you can buy menthol filters?" I hadn't known, and when she told me, I refused to believe that the menthol content in these filters would be strong enough for me (the menthol hit from sucking things like cough sweets nowhere near hits the spot, as it's far too weak a dose).

One day when things were hitting dire straits down the path of financial melodrama, I thought I'd better explore Rosemarie's recommendation of using roll-up tobacco with menthol filters.

I was pleased to see how cheap they were, and bought just one packet to begin with.....and I was pleasantly surprised.

Zig-Zag Menthol Slim Filters come in a wedge-sealed clear plastic bag, with a largely blue front which bears the Zig-Zag logo. The bag lies fairly flat with the filters distributed inside, hence making for easy storage. Like any other kind of hand-rolling filter tip, you simply place it in the end of the cigarette, pack with tobacco, then roll!

Expecting not to notice the menthol taste at all, or for it to be there but in a far lower dose than I need, imagine my surprise when I took my first puff on my first ever roll-up, and found that the "hit" of menthol was even stronger than that of any tailor-made brand of menthol cigarettes - and, I've tried them all at various times over the years.

The satisfaction levels for a dedicated menthol-cigarette smoker are spot on with Zig-Zag mentholated filters - and to me, they are far superior to the one and only other brand of menthol filters that I'm aware of. On sealing the bag, the menthol doesn't seep out of the filters at all, which is a definite bonus for me.

Though the other brand of mentholated filters can be bought in most outlets which sell cigarettes and tobacco, I've only so far seen the Zig-Zag brand in my local market-type novelty shop (as described above), and in a Pound Shop in Southend-on-Sea. I rarely go to Southend, as the journey is too far for me to undertake on a regular basis, so I stick to buying them closer to home.

Using Zig-Zag Menthol Filters has rendered it so that I now prefer roll-ups to tailor made menthol cigarettes, and I am spending only a small fraction on smoking as a whole, than I did before my redundancy.

To any smokers of menthol cigarettes, if you have been put off rolling your own because you feel you'll have to forego the menthol, then I strongly recommend you find a shop that sells Zig-Zag Menthol Filters and give them a go. 75 in each pack means they last for ages, and if you can buy a box of 10 packs at a much cheaper rate, you'll be quids in!

Thanks for reading!

Summary: A life-saver for my bank account