It Lit the Fire … and my Eyebrows

I want to score this four stars because it's awesome. I should at a minimum rate it three stars because it does everything it intends to do, and does it just fine. But I feel I should score it two stars because I probably should have known better than to play with fire at my age. After a year of additional rounds with it, I'm settling here: Mixed Review.

This was a gift from a friend who knows of my passion for gadgets and my questionable judgement … as I think about it, knowing me as well as they do and still giving me this has me rethinking our "friendship." Nevertheless, the Semlos Propane Torch is both awesome and frightening at the same time.

Easy enough to use: just screw in a camping-size propane bottle, turn on the gas, pull the trigger, and you get a full-on 6" blue flame shooting out of the barrel, ready to light the dampest campfire, roast the skin off a marshmallow (or a finger) in under 3 seconds, or crisp up your crème brûlée in the kitchen.

But the Semlos Propane Torch can also be a bit persnickety and leaves little margin for error. Lighting a fire one night, I opened the gas valve and pulled the trigger a number of times to no avail. It wouldn't light. Using my superpower, I continued to squeeze the trigger with dogged persistence while propane gas began to rise up around me. Fortunately I only managed to singe all of my arm hairs, burn off half the length of my eyelashes, and curl a couple of eyebrows once the torch finally lit up with a ball of flaming gas around me.

The Mrs. Questionable Test.

Having once singed her own eyebrows trying to light a cigarette from a gas stove in college, Mrs. Questionable was thankfully more empathetic to my experience with the Semlos, but she 100% said I could not re-gift it for the office white elephant gift exchange.