Ropp: Ruby Sandblasted Apple Tobacco Pipe

Ropp's shaping style tends to favor classic shapes, the French marque often rendering them in lightweight proportions with a streamlined appearance. Such an approach suits shapes like the straight Apple perfectly. Here, the bowl is overall a bit plumper, more evenly balanced, and a tad more upright compared to other Apple renditions from Ropp's Vintage Stout line as well as Squat pieces from the Algerian Superior series. The bowl's visual presence is accentuated further by being paired to the trim, slightly elongated stem that tapers gradually and gracefully from the shank. Such a svelte, lightweight design showcases Ropp's penchant for classic shapes and how much variety the French marque offers when it comes to shape-chart standards.

Ropp's Ruby line presents a more colorful palette than the French marque's other series, dressing each pipe in a crimson sandblast. Such a stain hearkens back to old-school French and English pipes, and the retro style is furthered by the inclusion of new old-stock stems of genuine horn — a mouthpiece material used extensively in the early 1900s. Though the horn stems also call to mind Ropp's Vintage, Vintage Stout, and Vintage Superior series, the Ruby prioritizes darker-hued horn for a deeper, warmer aesthetic that pairs handsomely with the scarlet stain of the stummel. Furthermore, unlike the Vintage lines, Ropp's Ruby offers both straight and bent shapes: While vulcanite and acrylic are relatively easy to bend, requiring only heat, horn is much more unruly, needing both heat and prolonged pressure to ensure the bent shape holds. To fashion the Ruby's bent pieces, then, Antoine Grenard, who runs the old Chapuis-Comoy factory in Saint-Claude, France, went so far as to use a vintage stem-bending machine from the Chapuis-Comoy pipe museum, thoroughly cementing the Ruby line's vintage appeal.