Women & Cigars

Women usually tend to find cigars 'icky', or say that they smell bad. However, a group of regular female cigar smokers does apparently exist.

Here is a 2008 study for the cigar inudstry with all the numbers. I believe 100 men were surveyed and 83 women were surveyed:
http://www.womencigarsmokers.com/survey2008.pdf

Now, it says the size of the regular female cigar smoker population/market is unknown. I would bet that women make up less than 5% of the regular cigar smoking population, or about 1 in 20 regular cigar smokers are women. By regular cigar smokers I am refering to people that smoke cigars multiple times a month. The average female cigar smoker in this study smoked 3-5 cigars per month.

Some interesting Facts from the survey:

*Surprisingly the main reason why women bought cigars was not dissimilar from men. 82% of the women said that the main reason for buying particular cigars is experience with the brand. Large Majorities also said that they were indifferent to box presentation or cigar label design. I guess serious female cigar smokers cannot be enticed by shiny bands and pretty colors.

*59% of the women surveyed said their main motivation for smoking cigars was the taste, I don't have the figures for the men in this survey, but in my experience I would probably say 80%-90% of regular cigar smokers smoke cigars because of their taste.

*Here's one directly from the summary: In this survey, women were asked how they feel when smoking cigars. What we found was that women’s feelings about themselves were very different from those of men while smoking cigars. Women responded that they feel powerful (24%), attractive (25%), strong (15%), fun (43%), and rebellious (22%) when cigar smoking. Men, when asked the same question, responded in much lower numbers. Instead, men felt peaceful when smoking cigars (97%), a sentiment that was shared by 76% of women.