How to store cigars

Last updated: August 21, 2026

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Storing cigars is a question of keeping an object stable. A cigar is dried plant matter wrapped in a thin leaf, and it exchanges moisture with the air around it continuously. Left alone, it drifts towards whatever the room is doing. Everything below follows from that one fact.

What you are actually controlling

Not water, but relative humidity — the amount of moisture the air holds compared with the maximum it could hold at that temperature. Our glossary gives the range a humidor is designed to hold: 65 to 72 percent.

The word relative carries the whole difficulty. Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air, so the same quantity of water vapour represents a lower relative humidity when the box warms up, and a higher one when it cools. A humidor moved from a cool room to a warm one has not lost any water, but its reading will fall. This is why a hygrometer alone never tells you the whole story, and why storage advice always pairs humidity with temperature.

Stability matters more than the exact figure

A box sitting steadily at 68 percent is in better shape than one that swings between 62 and 74 across a week, even though the second spends time at the same value. Moisture moves through a cigar slowly and unevenly: the wrapper responds before the filler does. Rapid change means the outside expands or contracts while the inside lags, and that difference is a mechanical stress on a leaf a fraction of a millimeter thick.

Practical consequence: choose a spot that does not change much, and open the box less often than you think you need to. An interior cupboard away from windows, radiators and exterior walls will do more for stability than any device.

What the range exists to prevent

Below it, the wrapper loses moisture, shrinks against the filler and eventually cracks or unravels. The damage is visible and it does not reverse — rehydrating a cracked wrapper does not close the crack.

Above it, the problem is the opposite: sustained damp is the condition mould needs. Mould on a cigar is a disposal, not a cleaning job.

The interval between the two is not narrow, which is the reassuring part. It is a range, not a set point.

The container

A humidor is a sealed box with a reservoir inside it. The seal is what does the work: it isolates a small volume of air so that a modest amount of moisture can hold that volume at a stable value. A box that does not close properly cannot be corrected by adding more water — it will simply consume it and keep tracking the room.

Two consequences follow. A box that is nearly empty holds its value less steadily than a full one, because there is more air to buffer and less material holding moisture. And a new box, or one that has stood dry for a long time, will absorb moisture into its own walls before the air inside settles.

Keeping track

Storage becomes a great deal easier when you know what is where, and since when. If you keep more than one box — one at home, one at the office, one for travel — you also need to know which cigar went into which.

That is the part Cigarino handles: an inventory split across humidors, with the date each cigar was added, so the question of what has been sitting the longest has an answer instead of an estimate.

What this page does not tell you

No temperature figure, and no product recommendation. We publish the humidity range because it is the one our own glossary already defines; we do not publish numbers we cannot point to a source for, and we do not link to sellers of tobacco products. Everything above describes how a stored object behaves, which is a matter of physics and can be checked.