By Duke London for marijuana.com
A few weeks ago, a number of readers reached out to ask if I’d seen the viral video on Twitter of a woman rolling blunts with rose petals. A sucker for a novelty weed smoking trick, I obliged the internet inquiries and watched the video.
It was mesmerizing. Twitter user @Simple_Sasha made the process look so effortless, like she had been rolling these romantic rippers from the first day she started smoking. But it couldn’t be as easy as Sasha made it look in the short clip, for we’d have been smoking these beautiful blunts from the jump. I set out to investigate.
HOW TO ROLL A ROSE BLUNT pic.twitter.com/2Cr26rzllF
— Sasha💋 (@simple_sasha) September 14, 2017
When I walked into the flower shop to pick up some roses, I almost made a very expensive error. Though Sasha secured what appeared to be a fully intact rose for her demonstration, I couldn’t be so sure I’d nail these blunts on the first few tries. A dozen roses are expensive, to say the least — I’m just lucky we weren’t trying these out in early February.
Thankfully, the florist let me in on a little secret once I explained these petals would be utilized purely as a delivery system for weed smoke, telling me it would be much cheaper to buy a box of roughly 100 rose petals than an actual bouquet. This way, I could “practice” all day long without worrying about a little thorn in my side called “overdraft fees” — or actual thorns.
With my box of rose petals in hand, the real challenge was still ahead.
Upon returning to the lab, I got to work on rolling up some rosies. Sasha, the unequivocal worldwide expert on constructing these novelty blunts, instructed those watching at home to line up three petals in an overlapping fashion before placing them in the oven for just ten seconds. Sasha said to set the oven to broil, but I ran into problems right away with my trusty toaster oven.
Because the heat source in a toaster oven is physically closer to the petals, the heating times were completely out of whack. After setting the not-so-easy-bake oven to broil and leaving the petals inside for the allotted ten seconds, what came out were brittle, blackened, extra well-done remnants of roses.
After adjusting my heating times for the alternative oven choice, fine-tuning took some trial and error. If there is too much moisture in the petals, the eventual wrap will be too soft and flimsy to roll — imagine a Backwood marinated for a week in tears. To nail this blunt rolling challenge, you must master the preheat of the petals as well as the post-roll dehydration session before you light it up. A finished rose blunt that isn’t properly dried out may spark initially but will definitely not stay lit, and you want a certain amount of firmness to the blunt so it won’t bend down and burn you mid-session.
The best rose blunts I rolled were dried in the oven until they turned a dark purple color while still maintaining some malleability. A departure from Sasha’s instructions, I found that removing the white, slightly hardened base of each petal where it attaches to the flower allowed for more rolling flexibility.
Next, the petals need to be attached to one another before you can fill the wrap with flower. While Sasha simply gives the back of each petal a quick lick before fastening them to each other, the process wasn’t as easy for me — getting the petals to stay fastened to one another was a painstaking task at times.
Needless to say, I cheated. But you won’t be upset after you hear how and why.
The frustration of the petals separating mid-roll started to get to me, so I upped the ante on these rose blunts by fastening the petals together with some concentrate. Obviously, going off Sasha’s script wasn’t planned, but we like to consider ourselves innovators at Marijuana.com, so it only made sense to include some delicious “nectar” in our flower-infused flowers. If you plan on copying this modified rose blunt, add a little drying time before you roll, as you’ll only want to do limited heating of the blunt after you add any extracts to the wrap.
The petals themselves, once dried and situated perfectly, actually roll quite well. If you’ve mastered the art of rolling Backwoods blunts, you shouldn’t have any trouble with roses.
While a little wobbly, the petals tend to stay where you need them while folding and licking the rest of the seal. The tried and true method of licking all seams and using your lighter to dry out and sanitize will serve you well here.
It took me roughly three times longer to roll the rose blunt as it would a traditional blunt, but the smiles it generated from bystanders and smoking participants were well worth it.
The one prevailing question I heard from onlookers was, “are roses safe to smoke?” The answer is a relative yes, especially when compared to any tobacco leaf blunt you’d already be burning alternatively. In fact, there are some redeeming qualities to replacing your normal weed wrap personal preference with the flower formerly only bought on Valentine’s Day or when your girl is “mad as hell at you.”
According to Kulreet Chaudhary, M.D., roses aren’t just beautiful decoration or gifts but surprisingly effective as a healing natural medicine as well. Rose oil has long been utilized in aromatherapy to “soothe allergies or asthma, calm anger, alleviate depression, help with headaches, and lighten feelings of resentment, jealousy, and grief.”
Image courtesy of Lauren Grotz
Inhaling the oil from rose petals already helps the user achieve a soothing, restorative slumber, so imagine throwing a heaping helping of some Indica-dominant flower into the mix (I HIGHly recommend the recently-reviewed Animal Cookies).
Images courtesy of Stephen Panosian
