Disclaimer: I'm using this account as a personal log of what I've smoked and what I think about it. Form might be a bit sketchy but it's what suits me.

Now a bit about me: I started smoking a pipe as a student around 2008. I knew about the pipe world since there are many pipe smokers in my family: My father used to smoke one (along with cigars and unfiltered cigarettes) his sister (my aunt) and his mother (my grandmother). I was attracted by it because I had always enjoyed the stronger tastes in tobacco, even as a first time cig smoker in high school. Although I've never been a heavy cigarette smoker, I wanted to go deeper in the pleasures of smoking.

I was born and raised in Paris. I bought my first pipe in a lovely pipe shop in the Palais Royal near the Louvre. The woman in the shop gave me the first secrets of the trade and pointed a good tobacconist to go to. Until around 2017, I only smoked that one pipe, an LMB lovat, and whatever tobacco I could find in local shops. You must know that here in France, it is very hard to find good tobacco. OTCs are very few and, for the most part, quite bad.

I stopped smoking for about 5 years. No particular reason. I guess I just got bored with it.

Summer of 2017, I decided to stop smoking cigarettes entirely. It wasn't hard. I knew I wasn't addicted to nicotine, but I soon got nostalgic for that thick smoke... So, one evening, after my newborn baby had gone to sleep, I got my old pipe out of it's almost forgotten box and the dried out pouch of Kentucky Bird tobacco that was with it... and lit up. Of course, the tobacco was bad and the pipe had been stored dirty but it was enough to get my interest sparked again!

I spent the whole 2018 summer browsing reddit, reading rebornpipes' restauration posts, buying underrated estate treasures and starting a cellar of fine tobaccos. I'm now deep in PAD and TAD.