I’m still working out how to actually manage the literal 'take a pinch process (yes I have a few ‘personal problems’ that have made this evidently-easy-for-everyone-else feat a bit beyond my scope and have been bullet/utensil/back of my hand dependent) I have unusually small fingers, rather bad eyesight and pronounced coordination issues (I am multiply disabled), etc however I may be making breakthroughs on the ‘stick your fingers in and grab a pinch and sniff directly to your nostrils’ method with certain snuffs of a certain maybe medium moistness and grind I have very recently finally found some small success with actually grasping a small but intentional sized pinch between thumb and ‘pointer finger’ managing to keep it in fingers to get it to nose, then kind of with thumb under and pointer on top, rolling back the pointer to reveal the snuff on my thumb and then sniffing however, this brings a new thing… ‘snuff fingers’ I have telltale brown sniff fingers and a couple of snuff fingernails (also have a slight pinky issue as a result of ‘escavation activities’ this isn’t really acceptable to me and I wonder if anyone else has this. I don’t have a darker snuff-stained brown spot on the back of my hand for sniffing from there but I do see this is a problem for fingers and short of constantly cleaning my nails and REALLY getting OCD about hand washing, I’d like to know if others have this, and if they do, what they do for it. so… is it me, do I have magical special stain-prone fingers or are the rest of you washing your hands and preening your nails every fifteen minutes, or what?
Have you ever tried the snuff bullets? I always have a mess on my shirt and face, and have to brush off my shirt and wipe my nose with a tissue when pinching.
Have you tried using a spoon? I generally prefer to use a Czech pipe tool spoon to partake of snuff for the very reasons you have stated, such as the ‘snuff fingers’.
@tom502 (quoting myself from my first post) “have been bullet/utensil/back of my hand dependent” Everybody keeps going on and on about how they pinch and pinching is the best way but it sticks to my fingers tips and gets under my nails in a way it really doesn’t from the back of my hand, a sniffing tool, or from the bullet and I just wanted to know if this is ‘just me’ being really inept, or if other people also get brown fingers and if so if somehow its just ‘okay with’ them or something (and I realize I’m in a sea of men here and yes typically men don’t tend to care as much but everyone here can’t be blue-collar workers with rough grub-inducing jobs, I bet people like mechanics and steal mill workers, etc are in the minority I mean no offense but for lack of a better way to say this: some (most in fact) here talk and carry on like they’re fairly uhm… ‘high falootin’ and give an impression of either being or trying to be some sort of excessively educated upper middle class types so I don’t get that, how running around in your business suits etc or whatever or in your ‘high falootin’ circles (or even if its really a bunch of college kids here who knows? with your college buddies then out at the ritzy little bars and restaurants or whatever and your college girlfriends and professional career girlfriends and wives), how is gonna work out with grime under your nails or that big brown stained fingers, how is that really gonna do? and no it really doesn’t just brush off that easily, not off finger tips and not from under even short cut nails, it wants to stain, just like using a tube-injected cigarette maker an smoking left stains on my fingers and (in the case of smoking) a few yellowed fingernails, and there is no way if a person is a habituall sniffer they can keep up with this by constant handwashing, it wants to make stains there.
NJEO3, yep “have been bullet/utensil/back of my hand dependent” czech tool tip most of the time for me too, to exact but I’m confounded by the apparent minority that you I and tom502 seem to be in… seems, to read here anyway, the great impression is that most everybody else is literally pinching (and they tell you that pinching is the better way to go etc etc) and to read people here, it just doesnt’ seem generally speaking, like the majority of people here (who express as if they go for fine wines, fine pipe tobacco, finest cigars, read uhm… ‘stuff’ that indicates good costly higher educations, go for the ‘finer side of’ most anything, I bet if there was a clothing discussion we’d hear about the beset suit makers etc, you get the idea) that grubby brown fingers would fit so well with all this. so, something’s just not stacking up here and I can’t figure it, and so I am asking.
I’m a back of the hand kind of guy, which in England is the “working class” way of doing it. The posh people pinch. I have no idea if they have brown finger.
I dump some out on the back of my hand and take my pinches from there. It usually leaves a bit of a brown stain on my hand, which is easily brushed away by my hankie. After I sniff, I find some on my fingers and under my nails, but I wouldn’t really call it a stain. It’s more like residue. This also comes off easily by wiping them on the outside of my hankie. I do occasionally get some under my nails, but a penknife takes care of that quickly in a couple of seconds. If I don’t have a knife handy, the edge of an index card or piece of paper works well, as does putting your hankie over your finger, and using your nail through the hankie to scrape the other nails. My mom gardens, and when she gets dirt under her nails, she puts a dab of hand sanitizer on her palm, and ‘scratches’ it, and that cleans them out.
I crop my nails on my pointer and thumb so close that no snuff can get under them…though that may be hard for some. My fingers don’t really stain, but I wash my hands a lot in my field. …snuff should be enjoyable, if enjoying snuff means using an implement to scoop snuff and sniffing off your hand or whatever, than by all means, do what you must!
@Nachman, I believe you abut the working class vs posh British methods – but I have to say that REALLY confounds me… maybe the posh dont’ sit around sniffing all day like I do, or they have white gloves (I can totally see Queen Elizabeth doing this) which the butler runs away with to replace every 15 minutes, I dunno (that’d certainly be worth finding out though just how do the posh work this out? I wouldn’t even know how to phrase a google search to even ask) I’m happy to match up and pair off then with the British working class (I am the worlds most devout Beatles fan and as a result I am a ‘britophile’ – love pretty much all things British, but with my combination of my orignal intrinsic favor for America’s ‘working class’ plus, well, the Beatles were originally from Britain’s working class’ too) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njG7p6CSbCU As for me, well I’ve had one year of university which defied all odds (and which is why I came to live in Kalamazoo in the first place GO WESTERN MIICHIGAN UNIVERSITY GO BRONCOS!)… I don’t believe in stating numbers but I’ll tell you my IQ ‘holds its own’ against anyone’s – in spite of the fact that I have a developmental disability (Kanner’s Sydrome/Kanner’s/Classic/severe Autism, I know I was the first severely autistic to attend that university, possibly still the only one) but I come from a long line of Tool and Die workers grandfather, father (who eventually went to IUSB) and and uncle on his side) and a place that had lots of steal mill workers and where everybody male (and mostly Polish) dreamed to go to Notre Dame and be Fighting Irish (the days of Rudy Ruttiger and … still can’t spell him “Era Parsegian” etc)… South Bend IN, back when it had the ethnic poles and Hungarian neighborhoods, Studebakers and making them were something to be quite proud of) etc and I eventually mostly grew up in a place not far from it that fits very well the description another Hoosier, John Cougar Mellencamp, gave here (and expresses that same fierce pride I carry to this day): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y4X71rYKZU and even though I was also a tomboy growing up and I’m petite and quite feminine in shape etc I could say its a ‘girly thing’ to not want the brown fingers and nails, but I don’t really think that’s why.
@matsnuff & @MrSnuffy well I don’t know but the skin on back of my hand seems to be quite a ‘different deal’ than the skin on my fingertips, any remainder there is just dust that like you say, I can swoosh or blow off and done, but it quite quickly embeds its elf into the ridges and different skin of my fingers and thumb and I already keep quite short fingernails (which are small enough to be soft still, softer than most other women’s I think and just for being really small they are like little kids more, never grew hard, they are nothing like you men’s fingernails and they just… are too curved to pour snuff on top of but are stunningly good at getting dirt in where I can’t even get it out.
I am not a blue collar type and, yes, I am definitely fastidious when it comes to snuffing etiquette. I never snuff off the back of my hand. I don’t find it a very useful method, plus it seems a rather inelegant manner of snuffing. I suppose that I do not take very large pinches, and I have worked hard to refine my pinching method to the point at which little if anything is spilled. I have never had a problem with stained fingernails, but I’m a frequent hand washer anyway. Having said that, I seldom snuff away from home. I’ll bring a tin with me to a bar, but that is about it. Still, I do find it useful to keep a Toque bullet in the car. Bullets have their use on the go, but I never use them at home.
@kjoerup I get stain starter just about every time I take a pinch and certainly by every other or third time I do it, and I do sit around my apartment perpetually sniffing, unless I really wanted to be like a person who really and truly has the hand-washing obsessive-compulsive disorder (and end up drying and cracking my skin and ironically leaving me more vulnerable to germs the way OCD people who do this actually end up doing to themselves), there is just no way I could keep up. It makes more sense that you don’t pinch when out and about, and I’m guessing you’re not a ‘monkey at a lever’ type of sniffer when at home, else you couldn’t keep up either, or you have that amazing mystery finger tip skin that is more impervious. PS, I’m unfortunately not one of them (being as I live officialy below the poverty line on disability) but working class people really rock, (being also as they real backbone of most modern countries for which other ‘non-blue color’ wouldn’t exist otherwise). "elegance’ and all that is nice and has its place and is lovely all, but so are just being honest, real, down to earth and plain0spoken. You should check it out sometime.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m rich or pretentious. Over-educated, yes, but that unfortunately does not necessarily translate into wealth. In my case it certainly has not! As for the Beatles, they all originally smoked Woodbines – the preferred working class cigarette of the day. Upon becoming their manager, Brian Epstein forced them to switch to a “sophisticated” brand (Senior Service).
Hmmm, I have small fingers and such, but I still don’t have the issue of snuff getting into the ridges and stuff on my fingers. I can just dust it or rub it off. Here’s a novel idea, though you’d have to find some that doesn’t smell,: get some clear fingernail polish and paint it over the parts of your fingertips that you snuff from. It should make a seal between your finger and the snuff, and it shouldn’t stick. Like teflon for your fingertips. I had a grandpa that always kept a bottle of clear polish in his medkit to seal minor cuts, because he didn’t beleive in band-aids. It’d have to be non-smelly though, or it could be unplesant to smell the polish while you’re snuffing. It should wash off easily enough from your skin, also, with some soapy hot water, or peel it off. Just a novel idea.
@mrsnuffy… thats an interesting idea… maybe some other substance entirely… I don’t know… then I thought about my latext/rubber gloves I have happen to a ton of (for medical purposes)… wonder if that would make the snuff smell… and would look a little funny (good thing I do this at home eh?) or I could be like (my current image of courtesy of nachman) The Queen of England with some big long clothy white gloves (or maybe brown or black ones like our hankies to be more functional) that go down to my elbow… no, the snuff would get stuck in the clothy gloves probably (pretty much the way it gets stuck in my shirt or any other clothy place if I drop any) then instead of having to track down and chase down the czech tool (the thing that finally got me trying pinching again as I got sick of its always not being wherever I was sitting) I’d have to track down the gloves… or the (which ever) goo I needed to apply to and then wait for it to harden on my fingers…
I generally go off the top of my thumbnail, not trusting the cleanliness of my hands.
I think I really just need an army of czech tools or … nasal snuff spoons (*sigh* that elusive non existant thing I can’t find one of let alone an army of) to have placed strategically at my snuff-stop spots where I sit and sniff. Bullets also don’t’ work for a lot of snuffs so I really think this is gonna be the solutin (if I can ever find more snuff sniffing utensils) Does McDonald’s still have those goofy little coffee plastic spatulas? (you know, the ones they replaced their little plastic spoons with some years ago because people figured they made good coke spoons)? If they have them, maybe I should find a way to get somebody to take me to a McDonalds and load up on those little coffee spatulas and see if that would work for a start, I don’t know.
whistlrr, I think having a few Czech tools around your snuffing areas would be a great idea. Personally I carry one on my keychain and have a loose one at my desk. As for where to acquiring some of these tools, perhaps this link may prove useful: http://www.marscigars.com/czech3waytool.aspx
The problem with the McDonalds spatulas is that they probably make good coke spatulas. LOL
@NJE03 Jeebus they only want a buck and a quarter for it? I bet they nail me with a crazy shipping would almost have to LOL all this time I’ve been ‘cleaving to’ my czech tool (not even knowing until I got to this forum what its name is, like its some rare costly mystery pipe utensil thing that of course I’d never find another one of again (it came along with my father’s old pipe and a few random other things like pipe cleaners which I also still have in my possession and no idea just when exactly I came to possess these things that’s how long I’ve had them but its been at least 2 decades I’d guess) bookmarking that and waiting until next month (I’ve had a little confusion at the bank I need to sort out ASAP just discovered today… I know full well I did not spend $800 or $900 extra on snuff or anything else but something’s gone terribly wrong at the bank because somehow it looks like that’s how much I’ve spent and until I get this sorted I’m not buying any other things whatsoever at all other than strictly the autodebit bill paying that goes on, as long as what ever is going on stops right where it is I can still get by but no extra until it is sorted)