How ultra-thin rolling paper is made: from Alcoy to the calender

A rolling paper looks like the simplest thing in the pack. It is in fact the product of a machine several hundred metres long, a pattern pressed into wet fibre by a roller, and two centuries of refinement in one Spanish valley. This note follows a Skins leaf from pulp to booklet, and then to the bench in the UK lab where the batch is either passed or not.

Alcoy, where the category started

Cigarette paper as a product was first made in Alcoy, in the province of Alicante, in 1764. The town had water, fibre and the paper trade already, and it became the centre of an industry that later spread to France and beyond. The history of rolling paper is largely the history of that region: the mills, the converters that turn reels into booklets, and the workforce that knows what an ultra-thin sheet should feel like off the machine.

Skins does not own a mill and does not pretend to. It is manufactured in Spain, in the Alcoy region, by the mills and converters behind many of the most respected ultra-thin papers in the world, to a specification that is Skins' own. The Research Centre puts it in one line: the paper is theirs to make, the standard is ours to hold. The rest of this note is what "make" involves.

Pulp and refining

It starts with long plant fibre, the choice of which is covered in the note on rice, hemp and wood-pulp papers. The fibre is cooked and washed to remove most of the lignin that binds it in the plant, bleached without chlorine or left unbleached, and then refined.

Refining is mechanical. The fibres are passed between rotating discs that fray their surfaces and shorten them slightly, which sounds destructive but is what lets them bond. Frayed fibres interlock; smooth ones slide past each other. The degree of refining is one of the mill's most important controls, because it sets how strong the sheet will be at a given weight and how evenly it will form. For an ultra-thin paper, the target is a sheet that holds together at a basis weight where ordinary paper would fall apart, a point the note on GSM and basis weight makes in numbers.

The paper machine

The refined pulp is diluted to roughly one part fibre in ninety-nine parts water and fed onto the paper machine. On a Fourdrinier machine the slurry flows onto a moving mesh, the wire, where the water drains and the fibres settle into a mat. How evenly they settle is called formation, and it is the property that translucency reads directly: a well-formed sheet glows evenly against the light, a poorly formed one shows clouds.

While the sheet is still wet on the wire, a light roller covered in a patterned mesh, the dandy roll, rides on top of it. Where the pattern presses in, the sheet is thinned; where it does not, the sheet keeps its full weight. That pressed pattern is the watermark. On a banknote it is a portrait. On a rolling paper it is a fine regular grid, and on Skins it is a cross-weave. Its job is not decoration: it sets a repeating pattern of thin and thick zones that regulates airflow through the leaf and keeps the burn front slow and even, which the note on how a rolling paper burns explains in detail.

The watermark is pressed into the sheet while it is still mostly water. It is the mill's decision about how the leaf will burn, made before the leaf exists.

The wet sheet then passes through the press section, where felts and rollers squeeze out most of the remaining water, and the dryer section, a long train of steam-heated cylinders that takes it to a few percent moisture. It leaves the machine as a continuous reel, hundreds of metres long and less than a tenth of a millimetre thick.

Calendering

Off the dryers the sheet is dry but slightly rough. Calendering fixes that: the reel is run between stacked, heavy, often heated rollers under high pressure. The surface closes, the thickness evens out across the width, and the sheet takes on the smooth, faintly glossy hand that ultra-thin paper is known for. Calendering also increases translucency, because a denser, smoother sheet scatters less light.

There is a balance here. Calender too hard and the sheet becomes glassy and loses the grip that makes it rollable; too soft and it stays fluffy and opaque. The setting is part of the specification, and it is one of the reasons two papers of the same basis weight from different mills can feel completely different.

Gumming, slitting and the booklet

The calendered reel goes to a converter. First the gum: a narrow band of natural gum arabic is laid along what will become one long edge of each leaf and dried, at a width and coat weight Skins sets, as described in the note on natural gum. Then the reel is slit into leaf-width ribbons and cut to length.

The leaves are interleaved: each one folded so that pulling one out presents the next. Fifty-five of them are stacked, wrapped in the soft-touch board cover with the teal edge print and the fingerprint on the face, and cased in counter display boxes of twenty-five booklets. That is the unit of trade the stock page describes.

Then the lab

Nothing above is unique to Skins; it is how good rolling paper has been made for a long time. What Skins adds is the last row of the table. A sample from every batch is sent to the UK lab and put through the six tests in order: burn, ash, gum, translucency, flavour and roll. A batch that fails any of them does not carry the fingerprint. The note on what a verified batch means walks through each test and its pass mark.

That is the whole route. Fibre from the plant, formed on a wire in a valley that has been doing this since 1764, pressed with a watermark, calendered, gummed, folded into fifty-five and then checked. The Skins paper page describes the leaf it produces; this note is the reason it reads the way it does.