At the 5th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP5) in Seoul (November 2012), members of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) adopted the draft regulation on reduced ignition propensity (RIP) cigarettes into one of its Partial Guidelines under Articles 9 & 10 “Product Characteristics in Relation to Fire-Risk”. The Partial Guideline recommends commercial cigarettes to be sold to meet a proposed performance standard as tested by the available standard methods (e.g., ISO 12863 or ASTM E2187). In some jurisdictions RIP regulation has been in place for a number of years (e.g. since 2004 for New York). Fire statistics before and after the RIP regulation are available which may be used to evaluate the effectiveness of this regulation on cigarette-related fires in real life. At present there is a lack of agreement in the scientific literature on whether the effectiveness of the RIP regulation should be evaluated according to fire statistics on the number of fires or the number of fire fatalities. Without a fire, there can be no fire fatality. Mechanistically, however, RIP-compliant cigarettes are expected to display a reduced “ignition” probability in real life, i.e., the modified properties of these types of cigarette may only be associated with fire initiation and not with fire propagation where fatalities may occur under the influence of a host of other factors. In this work, literature on cigarette-related fires will be reviewed to highlight the differences between the two approaches and the need to conduct post-RIP regulation impact assessment based on valid scientific principles.