Body, strength and intensity are three different things
Weight in the mouth, nicotine in the blood, volume of flavour. Keep them apart and your notes get useful.
Body is weight, strength is nicotine, intensity is volume. A cigar can be heavy and mild, light and brutal, or quiet and enormous — and a note that treats the three as one word cannot tell you which.
Body
How the smoke feels physically: thin and airy, or thick and coating. It is closest to the concept of body in wine, and it is a mouthfeel question rather than a flavour one. Oily wrappers and dense filler tend to produce more of it.
Good test: hold the smoke for a second. If it feels like it is occupying space, that is body.
Strength
The nicotine hit. Independent of taste, and the only one of the three with physical consequences an hour later. Judge it after the cigar, not during: strength is cumulative and it arrives late.
Intensity
How loud the flavours are. A cigar can have enormous intensity and be mild in strength — many Dominican blends are exactly that — or be strong and quiet, which is a specific and rather underrated experience.
Do this: score them separately in your head before writing a note: heavy or light in the mouth, how much it hit, how loud it was. Three quick judgements turn "medium-full" into something you can actually act on next time you buy.
Why reviews confuse them
Because most descriptions are inherited from wine writing, where body and intensity often move together. In tobacco they routinely do not — a Connecticut-wrapped Dominican can be light-bodied with high intensity, and a Cuban corona can be medium in everything except the punch it delivers half an hour later.
The practical cost of the confusion is buying the wrong cigar: "full" on a shelf label might mean it will taste enormous, or that it will take your evening away, and those are different purchases.
Building your own reference points
Pick one cigar you know well as an anchor for each axis and describe new cigars relative to it. Comparisons survive years of drift in a way that absolute adjectives never do — "lighter in body than the Hemingway, stronger than it, about as loud" is still readable in five years.
Comparisons need something to compare with
Every entry in Ligero keeps the cigar, your score out of ten and your own words, and the journal keeps them in order. That is what makes "lighter in body than the one I had in March" a sentence you can check rather than a memory you are trusting.
Read next
What "strength" means, and why it is not flavour
Strength is a physical effect. Flavour is what you taste. They travel separately.
Tasting & notesWriting a tasting note you will still understand next year
Three sentences beat three paragraphs, if they are the right three.
Storage & ageingHow many cigars is the right number to keep
Enough that something is always ready, few enough that you know what you own.