Most of what is sold in this corner of the shop is bought once, kept for years, and chosen badly the first time. This page is the short version of what separates the things worth owning from the things that end up in a drawer.
Everything here is sold to over-18s only, and the range itself sits behind an age check.
Soft flame, jet flame, or torch — which one you actually need
A soft flame is the ordinary yellow flame of a disposable lighter. It is fine indoors and useless in wind, because it is a flame sitting on top of the fuel and any moving air takes it away.
A jet flame burns fuel under pressure. It is blue, narrow, roughly twice as hot, and it will not blow out — which is why every windproof lighter is a jet lighter. The trade-off is fuel: a jet burns through butane far faster, so refillability stops being a luxury and becomes the point.
A torch is a jet flame scaled up, with a broad chamber and a trigger. It is the right tool for a cigar, a crème brûlée, a soldering job or a stubborn barbecue, and the wrong tool for anything you want to hold in a pocket.
The honest rule: indoors and dry, a soft flame is fine. Outdoors, or for a cigar, buy a jet. For anything that needs sustained heat rather than a light, buy a torch.
The longer answer, with how to refill one properly, is in the guide: Jet flame or soft flame — which lighter do you actually need?
Why refillable matters more than the lighter itself
A disposable lighter is thrown away with fuel still in it, because the flint goes before the butane does. A refillable jet lighter is a metal object with a valve; the fuel is the cheapest part of owning one, and a can of butane refills it many times over.
Two things to know before you buy one. Purge it before refilling — hold the valve open with a small screwdriver until it stops hissing, or you are forcing new fuel into trapped air and it will not fill properly. And let it stand five minutes after filling; butane goes in cold, and a cold lighter lights badly and gets blamed for it.
The range: lighters and torches.
What an ashtray air purifier actually does — and does not do
An ashtray with a fan and a filter pulls smoke down and through activated carbon and a HEPA element instead of letting it rise into the room. The carbon takes the smell; the HEPA takes the particles.
What it does not do is make a room smoke-free. It captures what is drawn across it, which means smoke from a cigarette resting in the tray. Smoke exhaled into the room is not going near the filter, and no desktop unit will catch it. Bought for what it is — a way of stopping a resting cigarette scenting a whole room — it works well. Bought as room ventilation, it will disappoint.
Both parts are consumables. When the smell starts coming back and the fan still sounds normal, the carbon is full.
The full answer, including what to do about the smoke a purifier can never reach, is in the guide: Why does my ashtray still make the room smell?
Water pipes: what the water is for
The water does two jobs and only two. It cools the smoke, which is most of what people notice, and it catches some of the heavier particulate. It does not filter in any meaningful chemical sense, and a smoother draw is not a cleaner one — that is worth knowing rather than assuming.
Metal and glass together is the practical combination: the glass is the part that matters for taste, the metal is the part that survives being dropped. Change the water every time. Standing water is the single reason a pipe smells when it is not being used.
Storage: the boring one that fixes the most
Anything left loose goes stale, gets crushed, or smells out a bag. A rigid case with a seal fixes all three, and one with a lighter built into it fixes the fourth problem, which is that the lighter is never where the rest of it is.
Where to start
- Windproof, outdoors, or a cigar → the lighters and torches
- Smell in a room you also live in → the ashtray air purifier
- Something to keep it all in → the cases and pipes
- A gift rather than a tool → the resin ashtrays
Browse the full range, or read on if you are still deciding.