Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2010

Photo by James Hadfield

If you’ve already tried the gum, the patches, going cold turkey and beating yourself around the head with a copy of Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, this one’s for you. The Rien Pipe aims to wean wheezers off the evil weed in the space of a month by gradually filtering out the tar and nicotine contained in their regular brand. And you can’t say lazier than that. Each set contains 31 cigarette filters, which cut the amount of nicotine by an additional three percent each day, so if you’re smoking 0.1mg cigs, you’ll be down to 0.005mg by the end of the month. “May succeed in 31 days,” proclaims the box, with the same semantic ambivalence of those “Smoking may cause cancer” warnings on cigarette packets.

Rien Pipe set, ¥12,600. Available via www.rienpipe.jp/english