It’s March, and I have finally found my New Years’ resolution for 2025: an all-consuming need to spread the gospel of Vape. Right now, things are pretty dismal for us vape devotees. After riding in hot to near-universal adoration by adolescents keen to spread the joy of herpes, vapes have suffered an Emilia Pérez-level falloff, right into the pits of uncool. Nevertheless, I have some ideas on how to redeem our favourite flavoured oral fixation.
I think it is worth analysing, briefly, how vapes arrived at their dishonourable position in the nicotine-verse, a journey that is inextricably linked with our natural enemy: cigarettes. At one point, it looked like the victory of vapes and the final demise of their less-evolved, analogue, predecessors was inevitable. Cigarettes don’t come in Blue Razz Ice. They come in packages that brutally warn you about all the different ways they kill you, they stink, and they have been thoroughly pushed out of public life. You will be asked to leave if you smoke a cigarette on the dance floor, and the bouncer will not listen to your cries of ‘unhand me, you no-fun killjoy!’
Enter: the vape. A new method of nicotine ingestion, unburdened by what has been (70 plus years of research into health effects), that could be consumed anywhere, without attracting the ire of the general public. Vapes were cool, new, and hip.
But, the pendulum has swung back, my vaporous brethren. Our detractors have spread vicious lies, like “that smells like you mixed cough syrup with burnt plastic”, and made baseless assumptions, “Do you have neuroses about having your pacifier taken away as a child?” On the other hand, what once were cigarettes’ flaws have been re-evaluated as their most attractive qualities: the ritual of departing the crowd to go to the exclusive little club of other smokers, the sexy allure offered by their risky nature, and their smell, which differentiates the mature and sultry of us from those who are not. This is without mentioning the romanticisation of cigarettes by titans of thought: for example, one one of my favourite quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing’.
If cigarettes are sexy, grungy, and romantic, vapes become ever more maligned as juvenile, unseasoned and humiliating. The damage done by Jeremy Allen White alone to the standing of vapes is unspeakable.
You might be saying to yourself ‘this sounds like the paranoid ramblings of the chronically online, the evidence shows that rates of tobacco use are continuing to drop, could you back up whatever you are saying with actual figures’. You dunce, I don’t need your so-called ‘empirical evidence’ when I have Sex And The City. In Seasons 3 and 4, which were released in 2000 and 2001 respectively, we watch as Carrie Bradshaw tries in earnest to quit cigarettes. Meanwhile, over 10,000 kilometres away, in Shenyang, China, Hon Lik, a pharmacist, was dreaming up the idea of the vape as we know it, which he would go on to patent in 2003. Fast forward to the 2021 SATC reboot, And Just Like That…, where we find Carrie Bradshaw, once again, smoking. There you have it, irrefutable evidence of the inverse relationship between cigarettes and vapes, as well as a dire prognosis for the future of vapes.
Where do we go from here? I have some thoughts. We need a Mormon-level image makeover (think Church of Latter-day Smokes). We need to make vaping vintage and nostalgic. We need to fire up the propaganda machine; flood every timeline with posts about how Gen Alpha will ‘never understand’. Furthermore, we need some sex appeal. The face of vapes is currently a pimply-faced teen. Alain Delon passed away last year, and with the disappearance of a bastion of the sexiness of cigarettes, there is a unique opportunity to make vapes hot. It’s a long shot, but if we could get Luca Guadagnino on board in getting characters to vape in his movies, we can subliminally signal that vaping is sexy. Imagine that scene from Challengers… but with vapes. Hot, right?
