“Our own research shows that by the end of the 1990s, less than 6 percent of women were smoking cigars and/or working in the industry, but that number has now increased to less than 15 percent,” Mr. Salazar said. “Many young, savvy and intellectual women in their 20s and 30s are beginning to smoke cigars. They see it as something with a lot more sex appeal than cigarettes; it’s more of a luxury item to them, a real lifestyle choice.”

As Ms. Pérez tells it, cigars have been more a way of life in her family than a lifestyle choice.

Her grandfather Manuel Pérez Sr. worked as a cigar roller in a factory in Havana. When Ms. Pérez was a baby, she said, her grandparents, parents and two siblings all left Cuba with her and settled in northern New Jersey.

Her father, Manuel Jr., well schooled in the craft, was soon rolling cigars in their backyard and distributing them to family members and friends.

“I remember my uncles sitting around at Sunday dinner with messy cigars hanging out of their mouths,” Ms. Pérez recalled. “It was kind of a normal, very mundane way of life.”

Then one day, Ms. Pérez approached her father. “I was about 9 years old and I asked him why he was always playing with this garbage in the backyard. It all looked to me like a bunch of leaves and dirt,” Ms. Pérez said. “He sat me down and gave me my own little pile of tobacco and I started folding it the way he did, and before you knew it, I rolled my first cigar. It was a real mess, but my father saved it and put it in the china cabinet so he could mock me for years to come.”

Ms. Pérez did not know it at the time, but her cigar-rolling skills would eventually pay handsome dividends. After earning a master’s degree in social work from Wheelock College in Boston, she got a job working with troubled youth. She was also earning extra money teaching a Zumba class when she joined Cigar Dolls two years ago. The average cost for a minimum two-hour event is $1,200 to $2,000, depending on the event and the quantity of cigars rolled.

“I try and keep my two lines of work very separate,” Ms. Pérez said. “I don’t want my little youth finding my photos online and teasing me and not taking me seriously as a social worker. But I am proud to be a cigar roller. We all have a background where we were trained in cigar-rolling techniques, which takes years to perfect, and we all work high-class events. There has never been any lowbrow sort of bookings; that kind of business would not be entertained.”