Is smoking cool again?

“Sure, cigarettes are bad for you but they make you look good.” That’s the sentiment driving smoking’s recent surge in popularity, said The New York Times.

Modern culture has re-romanticised the cigarette as an accessory: in films and TV shows, like “Materialists” and “The Bear”, characters with a tobacco habit “look cool or powerful”. And celebrities are “embracing cigarettes”, too, said Kate Ng in the Daily Mail. Stars like Sabrina Carpenter, Paul Mescal and Charli XCX are regularly pictured with a cigarette in hand, “leading the way to making smoking cool again”.

For the first time in two decades, smoking rates have increased in parts of England, particularly among young people. Rishi Sunak’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill may finally have been voted into law this summer, banning the sale of tobacco to anyone born in or after 2009, but the former Tory PM’s dream of “cigarette-free generations” is currently obscured by a growing cloud of Gen Z smoke.

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Nostalgia for ‘bygone’ hedonism

The resurgence of smoking was inevitable, said Flora Watkins in The Spectator. “Stick around long enough and everything comes back into fashion, even the main cause of premature death and preventable illness in the UK.” Maybe it’s a symptom of “Gen Z’s nostalgia for the 1990s, a rebellion against Rishi Sunak’s and Keir Starmer’s authoritarianism or the realisation that vaping is naff and nasty”.

Young people know about the harmful effects of smoking but “some of those who came of age” in the Covid years are having “a post-pandemic reaction to rules and regulation”, said Liz Hoggard in The Telegraph. Their new-found disposable income allows them to explore a “bygone era of hedonism”, where smoking gives you entry into a “ready-made micro-community”, centred around “gorgeous” props like Zippo lighters, cigarette holders and “multi-coloured Cocktail Sobranies”. Smoking is “a portable icebreaker”, the perfect “ritual” to smooth social interactions.

Do it ‘while you can’

Anti-smoking “zealots” may blame the resurgence on the government being “too soft” on smoking and not banning it completely, said Christopher Snowdon in The Critic. But it is actually more about the “hysteria over vaping” – which many now believe, incorrectly, is more harmful than smoking – and the “astonishing rate” at which the black market for tobacco has grown in response to government tax rises. And then there’s the “forbidden fruit” aspect: if the new legislation means we’re sliding into prohibition, “you might as well do it legally while you can”.

Across the Atlantic, smoking is on the rise, too. Americans feel that same “association with sophistication, rebellion and artistic freedom”, said Andrea Javor in USA Today. But also “against a backdrop” of “distrust” in government and public health departments, perhaps “the choice to engage with a known threat paradoxically feels safer than the chaos” many feel is beyond their control.

“Cool and dangerous are more alike than they are different”, said The Atlantic. It is the responsibility of regulators to “figure out how to kill the allure of smoking”. If not, the cycle of rejection and embrace of the cigarette will continue to plague us “ad infinitum”.