Flavored tobacco products — tobacco products with added flavorings — include types of cigarettes, cigarillos and cigars, hookahs and hookah tobacco, various types of smokeless tobacco, and more recently electronic cigarettes. Flavored tobacco products are especially popular with youth and have therefore become targets of regulation in several countries.
According to a 2013 survey of internet tobacco retailers, the most common flavors are apple, cherry, chocolate, honey, grape, menthol, mint, peach, rum, strawberry, "sweet" (including bubble gum, candy, mango, blueberry, strawberry, orange, gum mint, and toffee) and vanilla.
Flavored cigarettes
Cigarettes may be flavored to mask the taste or odor of the tobacco smoke, enhance the tobacco flavor, or decrease the social stigma associated with smoking. Flavors are generally added to the tobacco or rolling paper, although some cigarette brands have unconventional flavor delivery mechanisms such as inserting flavored pellets or rods into the cigarette filter. Cigarette flavors include anise, clove, cinnamon, spearmint, wintergreen, citrus, fruit, and alcohol (especially rum and cocktails). Flavors may be added to the tobacco, cigarette paper, filter, or even to the foil wrapper. Some tobacco companies have developed unconventional flavor delivery systems, including polymer pellet technology, using a flavored filter pellet (polyethylene bead), flavor micro-encapsulation in the paper or packaging technology, flavor fibers inserted into the filter, and flavored tips. Flavorings are typically added at the end of the cigarette manufacturing process. Flavored cigarettes are heavily preferred by youth, with a 2008 study finding that adolescents and young adults ages 17–25 use flavored cigarettes at about twice the rate of adults age 25 and older, with 17- to 18-year-olds being the heaviest users of flavored cigarettes, using them three times as much as adults.
Beedi
One common type of flavored cigarettes are beedis, a small, thin, hand-rolled cigarette originally from India, where they outsell regular cigarettes by a ratio of eight to one. Another is kretek, a cigarette made with a blend of tobacco and cloves that is popular in Indonesia. No flavored cigarettes, including menthol, beedis, and kreteks, are safe. Indeed, many flavorings produce increased levels of acetaldehyde when combusted, enhancing dependence and toxicity. Additionally, some of the flavorings in cigarettes contain toxic compounds such as alkenylbenzenes.
Menthol cigarettes
The most popular cigarette flavor by far is menthol, which represents 10% of the global cigarette market and makes up more than 25% of the market in countries including the United States, Singapore, the Philippines, and Chile. Menthol is a chemical found in plants of the mint family that produces a cooling sensation in the throat. It is often used as a cigarette additive to mask the flavor and feel of the tobacco smoke or to improve the throat and mouth feel of the cigarette. Menthol increases the addictive properties of the nicotine in cigarettes, in part by increasing the density of nicotine receptors in the brain.
In the United States, menthol cigarettes are used disproportionately by African Americans: more than 70% of African-American smokers primarily use menthols, compared to approximately 30% of White American smokers. In fact, menthol tobacco marketing is specifically targeted to African Americans; it is a subject of research and it has been a subject of litigation on discrimination grounds. This high use by African Americans is largely the result of deliberate marketing campaigns by tobacco companies, which exacerbated small racial differences in menthol cigarette preferences into large ones. Racial marketing strategies changed during the Fifties. The civil rights movement led to the rise of African-American publications, such as Ebony. This helped tobacco companies to target separate marketing messages by race. Tobacco companies supported civil rights organizations, and advertised their support heavily. Industry motives were, according to their public statements, to support civil rights causes; according to an independent review of internal tobacco industry documents, they were "to increase African American tobacco use, to use African Americans as a frontline force to defend industry policy positions, and to defuse tobacco control efforts". There had been internal resistance to tobacco sponsorship, and some organizations are now rejecting nicotine funding as a matter of policy. Tobacco company Lorillard even gave out free menthol cigarette samples to children in black neighborhoods in the U.S. in the 1950s.