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<\/div>\nKylie Jenner at Coachella, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy<\/a> in Love Story<\/em>, Charli XCX, well, everywhere: it\u2019s been declared that smoking is officially cool again<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Except, is it? While it feels like every celebrity of the moment has been spotted with a Marlboro between their fingers <\/strong>(check out @cigfluencers<\/a> on Instagram if you think I\u2019m exaggerating), the number of Americans with an affiliation for tobacco dropped to its lowest recorded level in 2024, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a>.<\/p>\n Long before this stop-start flirtation with nicotine \u2013 before the health warnings and moral handwringing \u2013 there was another, more elaborate way to indulge. In the early 18th century, a new kind of accessory had taken hold across Europe\u2019s courts and drawing rooms: the snuff box. Small enough to sit discreetly in the palm, these cases were designed to hold powdered tobacco, known as snuff, to keep it fresh and close at hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSnuff is ground tobacco, but it was flavored with lots of different resins, spices, and essences. It could be extraordinarily fragrant. And there were many kinds of recipes,\u201d Matthew Winterbottom, curator of decorative arts and sculpture at Oxford\u2019s Ashmolean Museum<\/a>, explains.\u00a0<\/p>\n By the late 17th century, as tobacco shifted from pipe-smoking to something more refined, more portable, and, crucially, more performative, the practical container similarly evolved. Rarely larger than four inches across, snuff boxes became showcases of extraordinary craftsmanship. Gold, enamel, porcelain, hardstones: no material too precious, no surface left undecorated. Miniature painters rendered intricate landscapes; jewelers set diamonds and colored foils to catch the light. Some boxes passed through the hands of a dozen artisans before they were complete.<\/p>\n Their value was as performative as their function. \u201cIf you\u2019re a flash person who\u2019s got a lot of money and you want to show off, a snuff box is something that can really do that,\u201d Winterbottom explains. \u201cIt would have probably been the most expensive object on your person at that time. It\u2019s like the equivalent of having a Lamborghini in your pocket.\u201d<\/p>\n Their appeal stretched to Europe\u2019s most powerful figures: \u201cFrederick the Great of Prussia, he was a very warlike king but also a massive snuff taker. He commissioned all these extraordinarily beautiful jeweled snuff boxes,\u201d Winterbottom says \u2013<\/strong> there were 300 boxes reported in the King’s collection. \u201cThese were incredibly feminine when we look at them today; they\u2019re extravagant and covered in diamonds, which might be at odds with our ideas of masculinity.\u201d<\/p>\n To carry a snuff box was to signal taste; to use one was to be noticed. It offered a perfectly choreographed moment: opened mid-conversation, extended with intention, closed with a flick that could suggest anything from intimacy to indifference. In 1711, The Spectator<\/em> magazine offered satirical lessons on the \u2018exercise of the snuffbox,\u2019 including \u2018rules for offering Snuff to a Stranger, a Friend, or a Mistress according to the Degrees of Familiarity or Distance,\u2019 distinguishing acts between \u2018the Careless, the Scornful, the Politic [or] the Surly Pinch.\u2019 In a way, it was the modern-day equivalent of sparking a conversation by asking for a light, knowing all too well there\u2019s one buried deep in your pocket.<\/p>\n With the rise of other forms of tobacco-taking and the introduction of cigarettes in the 19th century, the act of taking snuff began to diminish. As Winterbottom puts it, \u201cit makes you basically sneeze, gives you a kind of brown nose, and is sort of an odd habit. So it just fell out of fashion, really, in the Victorian period.\u201d<\/p>\n Changing ideals of masculinity only hastened its decline. \u201cThe 19th-century men are becoming much more somber\u2026 so it would have been rather unseemly, I think, for a man to be carrying a very elaborate snuff box around on his person,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n Yet while the contents fell from favor, the boxes themselves endured: no longer tools of habit or social accessories, but collectors\u2019 prizes. <\/strong>As early as 1908, The Atlanti<\/em>c magazine<\/a> described a single Louis XVI snuff box as unremarkable in provenance, yet it still fetched $10,000 at auction in Paris (roughly $300,000 in today\u2019s terms). Its value, the essay claimed, lay not in who had owned it, but in what it was: a small object capable of conjuring an entire vanished world of \u2018brocades […] diamond-buckled shoes,\u2019 and candlelit salons. That sense of enchantment has proved remarkably durable.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/elitetraveler.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2026\/04\/mrs.robertshurlocksr.annmanwaringjohnrussellbritish1801-1927x2560.jpg\")
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