Blu Cigs

Jenny McCarthy endorses Blu Cigs which means that technically, this electronic cigarette review should be a great one. You know that products generally endorsed by celebrities are good ones…. Well, mostly anyway.

What We Got

For our $100 budget that we set for each of these reviews, we decided to see how much we got for our money. The Premium 100 Starter Kit is what we decided upon, which currently retails for $89.95. We got the big charging pack with social features that alerts us when a retailer or other Blu Cig user is nearby, 2 batteries, a wall charger, USB charger, and five cartridges of whatever flavor you like. To be fair, you don’t get a lot with this starter kit, especially as it would appear to be the most expensive one on the menu. The likes of V2 Cigs and Green Smoke have many more options. An additional five pack of cartridges was $12.00 which technically, put us $2 over our budget but we decided to let it slide.

What We Liked

The charging case did come in handy but the social features…. Well, we will talk about those in a moment. The 7 flavors were indeed flavorsome and the feel of the electronic cigarette was very similar to that of a normal cigarette. Green Smoke and V2 Cigs give you a very realistic smoking experience but the cigarette itself is definitely bigger. The one that Blu Cigs offer is very much the same size as a normal cigarette; it’s just a little heavier but that’s not all that difficult to get used to.

With flavors like vanilla, pina colada, peach schnapps, cherry, java jolt, magnificent menthol and classic tobacco, there’s one in there to suit everyone, and the flavors were delightful. They also offer the cartridges in high, medium, low and no nicotine which made things nice and easy for us. This starter kit would seem to be ideal for a beginner to the world electronic cigarettes.

With the cartridges, you have the option of choosing them in a natural “filter” color, or a nice black one, and these match the batteries which come in white and black. This is great for those that don’t want it to be obvious what they are puffing away on. You do need to remember some of the most basic e-cigarette etiquette rules to get along with yours. Sometimes it’s better that they don’t look like a real cigarette because then they are easier to explain. The ones that look like real cigarettes are often mistaken for exactly that and can cause some nasty scenes in public places.

What We Didn’t Like

Unfortunately, with the positives comes a few negatives. For a start, we come to the social features of the charging case that comes with the premium starter kits. What’s the point in this? Yes, to be fair, having the option to make the pack vibrate and light up when you are near a retailer is handy, especially if you are running low in any of the stuff you need, but having the option of making the pack light up and vibrate when you are near another Blu cig user? That just seems a little stalker-ish for our liking. We felt it was too much of a gimmick to actually get any use out of.

The cartridges, although pleasant to taste, didn’t last that long and neither did the battery, which is why we found ourselves using the charging case more often than we did with the likes of V2 Cigs and South Beach Smoke. With most other brands, we were using approximately one cartridge per day. With Blu Cigs, we were definitely using around two to three cartridges, which meant that we needed to void our warranty and refill our cartridges in order to make them a worthwhile investment. Buying cartridges at that rate would prove to be expensive, and even if you were to refill your own cartridges, they would burn out very quickly. In fact, the first cartridge that we used burned out after just five refills. With most other cartridges, we found ourselves getting at least 10 refills out of them before they burned out.

In Conclusion

The company is a good one with some very impressive ideas but the technology behind the cases wasn’t mimicked by the technology in the product. The batteries were only lasting for around two to three hours and the cartridges for around the same length of time, perhaps a tad more. Blu Cigs would end up being a rather expensive decision if you chose to use them long term and although we would most definitely suggest these to beginners of the electronic cigarette world, we would normally advise you to move on from them fairly early on. In fact, we started with them and then moved on to Green Smoke and V2 Cigs.