El Bubble - It's a Girl

Background & Overview

El Bubble “It’s a Girl” is a pink bubble gum cigar made by Tootsie Roll Industries. It’s a novelty candy built around a very old tradition: handing out cigars to celebrate a new baby. This version skips the tobacco and swaps in 20 grams of pink bubble gum instead. Twenty grams! In one sitting.

It’s sold primarily in the US and Canada, mostly at candy shops, party supply stores, and online. You’ll often see it packaged in a small pink “cigar box” of five, which makes for a wholesome baby shower gift.

History

Handing out cigars at a birth is an old custom. The exact origin is fuzzy (some credit 19th century Native American traditions, others point to early 20th century military culture), but by the mid-1900s it was firmly embedded in American celebration culture. Someone at the Philadelphia Gum Company, founded in 1947, had the smart idea to make a bubble gum version so parents who don’t smoke could still participate in the ritual.

El Bubble cigars became a baby shower staple through the 1950s and 60s, with the classic pink-for-girl, blue-for-boy split. The Philadelphia Gum Company eventually sold to Concord Confections, which was then acquired by Tootsie Roll Industries in 2004. The brand has stayed put ever since. For a piece of candy this gimmicky, it has a surprisingly durable legacy.

Our Review

Three members of the Bubble Bunch took on the full cigar challenge, and the experience was… a commitment.

All three testers immediately flagged the serving size. One called it “barely fitting” in their mouth. Another spent 9 minutes just chewing it down to something workable. The third was more generous: “Generous serving size filled my mouth!” So there’s a spectrum. What everyone agreed on is that the sheer volume of gum works against you early on. Two out of three found the texture too hard out of the wrapper, which is less a flaw in the gum and more a consequence of having a hockey puck’s worth of it in your mouth at once.

Once you get past the initial workout, though? It actually delivers. The flavor sits somewhere between cotton candy, banana, and berry. Not complex, but genuinely enjoyable and a lot of fun. And because there’s so much gum, the flavor lasts a long time. One tester clocked 23 minutes. Another got 15. The duration score of 5.0 out of 5 is partly earned and partly a technicality: the flavor “lasts forever… since you have so much of it in your mouth.”

Bubbles were a highlight. Two testers got football-sized bubbles. One got softball-sized. That’s a strong result by any measure.

The bottom line: this is a novelty gum, and it excels at being a novelty. It’s not the one you reach for on a daily basis, though. If you’re celebrating a new baby girl and want to hand out something memorable, this is a solid move.