RAW Hemp Wick, 3m Roll

What it does, and the claim we are leaving on the shelf

Hemp wick exists because of one specific complaint: a butane lighter held directly against what you are smoking puts butane combustion products into the first few draws, and people who care about flavour can taste it.

A beeswax-coated wick burns differently. The flame is softer and cooler, it is fed by wax and hemp fibre rather than pressurised gas, and it does not carry that taste. That is a sensory claim, it is the reason hemp wick has existed for decades, and it is the one worth making.

Now the part we are not going to repeat. The trade description supplied with this product says the wicks promote a form of smoking that is better for you, and describes the audience as health-conscious. That is a health claim. We do not make health claims about anything on this site, including accessories, and we are not going to launder one by rewording it.

So: buy hemp wick if you want to stop tasting your lighter. That is the honest proposition, it is a real one, and it is enough.

There is a second, smaller advantage that goes unmentioned. A wick flame is easier to aim. You are holding a flexible piece of burning string rather than a rigid lighter with a jet on top, and it will reach into a bowl at an angle a lighter cannot manage without singeing your thumb.

Three metres is a small roll, and the category will tell you so

This is the context nobody selling a short roll provides, and it changes how you should think about the purchase.

Hemp wick is normally sold in long spools. The brands that specialise in it sell rolls of two hundred feet, and some run to seven hundred. Those are supplies rather than accessories, bought once and forgotten about.

RAW's is ten feet. Three metres. Between twenty and seventy times shorter than the specialist rolls, which makes it a pocket item rather than a stock-up.

That is not a criticism, it is a different product. A short roll lives in a tin or a pocket alongside the papers, gets used up and gets replaced. A two hundred foot spool sits at home on a shelf. If you have never used hemp wick and want to find out whether you like it, the short roll is obviously the sensible way in. If you already know you like it, buying three metres at a time is a slightly odd way to live.

On how long it lasts, the figure quoted across the guides is roughly three to five minutes of burn per foot, so ten feet is somewhere in the region of half an hour of continuous flame. You do not use it that way, of course. You burn a centimetre or two per light and pinch it out, so the number of lights runs into the dozens rather than the handful that figure implies.

It is beeswax, so it is not vegan

We looked through every guide ranking for hemp wick while researching this page and not one of them mentions this, which is remarkable given who buys it.

The hemp part is hemp. The coating is beeswax, which is made by bees and is an animal product by any definition. Hemp wick is bought overwhelmingly by people choosing what they see as the natural, unprocessed, plant-based option, and a fair number of those people are vegan or assume that a product called hemp wick is.

It is not. Beeswax is what makes it work: it is what holds the flame, controls the burn rate and stops the twine simply flaring up and going out. A wax-free hemp string would not function as a wick.

There are soy wax and plant wax alternatives sold by specialist wick makers for exactly this reason. We do not stock one. If beeswax is a problem for you, this product is not the answer and we would rather tell you now than have you find out from the ingredient line.

Ten feet on the trade code, three metres on the label

A small detail, and it tells you something about how the product was specified.

The trade code for this roll contains both figures: ten feet and three metres. Ten feet is 3.048 metres, so the three metre figure on the label is a rounded conversion of an imperial original rather than the other way round.

That fits what we found writing up RAW's rolling trays, where the brand publishes every size in inches and our distributor converts some of them to centimetres. RAW is an American-facing brand specified in imperial, and the metric figures on UK listings are translations.

It matters slightly if you are comparing rolls. A ten foot roll and a three metre roll are the same roll, and a genuine three metre roll from another brand would be a few centimetres shorter than this one.

Using it, including the bit that annoys people

The method is simple and takes one attempt to learn. Pull a few centimetres clear of the roll, light the end with a lighter or a match, wait a second for the flame to settle, then use that flame. Pinch it out between damp fingers or let it burn down against something non-flammable.

Two practical things nobody warns you about.

It drips. A burning beeswax wick releases melted wax, and if you hold it horizontally over something you will get wax on it. Hold it at an angle with the flame end lower and it runs down and away from your fingers instead.

And the flame is larger than a lighter's. It is soft and it moves in a draught, which is exactly what makes it easy to aim but also means it is less controlled in wind. Outdoors on a breezy day it is genuinely worse than a lighter, which is an honest limitation of the entire format.

Storage is trivial: keep it somewhere it will not get squashed, because the wax softens in a warm pocket and a flattened roll unwinds badly.

Who should not buy this

Anyone vegan, for the reason above. It is the single most important line on this page and it appears nowhere else in the category.

Anyone who already uses hemp wick regularly. Three metres will not last you, and the specialist brands sell rolls twenty times longer for people who have made up their minds.

Anyone who mainly smokes outdoors in the wind. A soft wick flame is harder to keep alight than a lighter, and this is the one situation where hemp wick is straightforwardly worse.

Anyone expecting it to do something for their health. It changes the taste. That is the claim, that is all of the claim, and the description supplied with this product goes further than we will.

And anyone who dislikes fiddling. It is an extra step, an extra thing to carry and an extra thing to pinch out. Plenty of people try it once and go back to a lighter, which is a perfectly reasonable outcome.