The Neglected Sense

Modern life seems to focus on delighting our senses.  How much time and energy and money goes into entertaining our visual, auditory, and taste senses?  Movies with brilliant special effects.  700 channels on our television, and the world a click away on the internet.  Music, audiobooks, and a cell phone with your 24-7.  Food, snacks, restaurants, candy bars.  Human beings spend most of their time immersed in sight, sound, and taste.

But, what of the neglected sense?  Oh, I suppose there are fancy candles you can light to give you home a certain smell.  And pine-tree shaped air-fresheners you can hang from your rear view mirror.  But, aroma therapy is hardly mainstream.  Our sense of smell is given a treat mainly as an accident.  Some cookies baking in the oven...or the smell of cinnamon rolls in a grocery store bakery.  The smell of old books in a used book store.  Rich scents steaming up from a fresh cup of coffee.

But, snuff-takers are again ahead of the curve.  The olfactory sense is a major component of our pleasant habit.  We choose, mix, and use snuff products in order to maximize our pleasure.  We connect certain snuff brands or scents with important moments in our life.  We compare notes about our sense of smell experiences, and engage in detailed discussions of this or that nuance of a scent we experience while snuff-taking.


While the nose takes a backseat to the eyes, and ears, and tongue of most people, snuff-takers put the nose front and center. 

Mark Stinson
Modern Snuff

Trick to Moisten the Inside of Your Nose

Many of you probably know this little trick, so I'm posting it for those that don't.  There are times when you are snuff-taking where your nose gets a little dry.  This could be due to not being properly hydrated (hydrate!), or it could just be that a sufficient amount of dry snuff has gone into your nose to sort of dry things up.  If the inside of your nose gets particularly dry, then any additional snuff you take will have a tendency to go too deep into your sinuses, and if you like a good back-drip, having a dry nose doesn't help get that brewing at all.

When I find myself in this situation I simply moisten my fingertips with some water, put them up to my nose, and lightly inhale some water droplets into my nostrils.  Instant moisture.

Personally, I don't limit myself to just water.  If I'm drinking some coffee in the morning, I'll inhale some droplets of coffee off my fingertips.  Diet Mountain Dew in the afternoon...sure, why not?  Enjoying a mug of root beer...yep, that'll work.  I look at this method of moistening the nose as just a simple and effective way of manipulating the environment in your sinuses, to maximize your enjoyment of snuff. 

Mark Stinson
Modern Snuff

Still Snuffing!

It has been a little bit since my last blog post.  Life comes at a break-neck speed sometimes, and never-so-much as when you are a husband and father of three active teens!

But, I'm still here.  Still enjoying a pinch of snuff (or lots of pinches of snuff).  And still interested in gathering and sharing information about our most pleasurable of habits...snuff-taking.

I have a couple of goals in the short term.  First, I want to up-date the Modern Snuff Website.  There are still 2 or 3 pages that are unfinished and a 1 or 2 pages I would like add from scratch.  The goal being to make the website a go-to place for historical and present day information about snuff tobacco.

And I would like to bring more content to the Modern Snuff discussion group.  There is nothing like fresh content to bring a social media group alive.

Mark Stinson
Modern Snuff