Is Smoking Cool again?
Was it Kylie Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair? Madonna and Charli XCX lighting up together at the latest Saint Laurent show? Or all the impossibly chic girls in Europe holding skinny cigarettes like it's 1997 again?
Whatever it was, smoking suddenly looks… cool.
Which feels strange, because we're also living through peak wellness culture. Everyone is optimizing something — peptides, cold plunges, infrared saunas, continuous glucose monitors, supplements with unpronounceable names. We've become a society where EVERYONE is a biohacker.
And yet nicotine is quietly making a comeback. As I write this from a coffee shop, the guy in scrubs in front of me just packed a mean dip. Walk around almost any city and you'll see people stepping outside for a cigarette. Nicotine pouches are everywhere — there are companies making "Zyn trash cans" for your desk now. Vapes never really left. Something has shifted.
It made me wonder: is this just the pendulum swinging back? When a culture pushes hard enough toward optimization, longevity, and perfect health, is there an inevitable counter-reaction?
History says this isn't unusual. Some of the biggest cultural shifts happen when a behavior doesn't change but its symbolic meaning does. Cell phones were once reserved for executives, and every ring demanded an answer. Today everyone has one, and the real status symbol is being able to ignore it.
So is smoking undergoing the same kind of rebrand? If so, what's driving it — and is there a healthier middle ground between obsessive wellness and outright rebellion?
Let's dig in.
Is Smoking Cool Again?
Smoking hasn't broadly become cool again — but it has become far more visible. We're not back in the Mad Men era. Still, after a chain-smoking Carolyn Bessette lit up regularly during the popluar show Love Story, it's back in a way that feels different than it did ten years ago.
Part of that visibility has always come from fashion, celebrity culture, film, and creative cultures, where the cigarette works as both an aesthetic object and an excuse to socialize. We all remember the one introvert in high school you could sneak off and share a cig — and have a real conversation with. Part of it comes from a more nuanced scientific conversation — cue Huberman and Rogan — about nicotine itself, as researchers keep exploring its effects on attention, cognition, and even the now ever-present spike proteins. And part of it is simply a reaction to a culture that has become consumed by self-optimization.
Why and When Did Smoking Become Uncool?
Smoking didn't become uncool overnight. It was a gradual shift over decades, driven by science, policy, and changing values. What once meant glamour and sophistication slowly came to mean disease and addiction.
Medical studies linked smoking to cancer and heart disease. In the 1950s and '60s, when large studies tied cigarettes to lung cancer, heart disease, and other serious illness, the tides began to change.
Government anti smoking campaigns reshaped perception. From the 1970s on, aggressive anti smoking campaigns ran on television and in schools, recasting smoking from sophisticated to dangerous. They became some of the most successful public health efforts of the twentieth century.
Advertising bans removed cigarettes from mainstream media. Tobacco brands were once sold by movie stars, athletes, even doctors. As countries banned cigarette advertising across TV, radio, billboards, and sponsorships, that aspirational image lost its megaphone.
Graphic warning labels killed the glamour. Packs that once gave the illusion of luxury became carriers of health warnings, some with graphic photos. The cigarette pack went from fashion accessory to cautionary label - with graphic medical photos.
Public smoking bans reduced visibility. As cities barred smoking in restaurants, bars, offices, airports, and planes, smokers moved outside.
Wellness culture changed the norms. Over two decades, mainstream values tilted toward fitness, sleep, nutrition, and longevity — and smoking came to symbolize their opposite.
Smoking in Pop Culture
If the habit faded, the imagery never did. Pop culture has kept the cigarettes on screen and the runways for a century.
Early Hollywood glamorized it. Black-and-white films leaned on strong visual cues, and a cigarette gave actors something to do with their hands while signaling sophistication or rebellion.
Mid-century advertising normalized it. Celebrities and aspirational lifestyle imagery made smoking look like the price of entry to glamour. The ‘cool kids’ do it.
Modern media uses it sparingly, but pointedly. Smoking scenes are rarer now, deployed for character or mood development. Ryan Murphy's Love Story, filmed around New York City, used the chain-smoking nineties heroine of Carolyn Bessette as instant period shorthand.
Fashion and editorial reach for it. Photographers still use the cigarette for mood, rebellion, or nostalgia — the skinny cigarette as styling prop.
Music videos and celebrity culture revive it. From magazine covers to a single curated Instagram account, a star with a cigarette becomes a visual identity signal that travels fast.
Why Do People Think Smoking Is Cool?
Rebellion and an anti-wellness identity. Every cultural movement eventually breeds its own rebellion. After years of injecting peptides, counting 17-minute sauna sessions, and wearing rings that grade our sleep, a counter-reaction was inevitable. We also tend to sort behaviors into "healthy" and "unhealthy" as if every exposure carried the same weight. Biology doesn't work that way — dose, frequency, intention, and cumulative exposure all matter. Risk and toxins live on a spectrum; we don't eliminate every risk, we contextualize it. We accept the occasional cheeseburger, the occasional drink, the missed night of sleep. The real question isn't whether smoking is "healthy" — it's whether an occasional cigarette belongs in the same category of infrequent indulgence, or whether nicotine is really so different from the sugar, the fast food, and the other engineered pulls we accept without a second thought.
Media, music, and celebrity influence. If you see Kylie — or your favorite actor — do it, you're more likely to do it too.
Social signaling in nightlife and creative subcultures. The cigarette is a social technology. Before smartphones, it was one of the easiest ways to start a conversation, justify a break, or share a moment with a stranger. It even reminds people to breathe — a pranayama practice, at this point. That doesn't make it healthy or unhealthy; it explains why the image keeps its pull. A cigarette says, "I'm not tracking this."
Perceived maturity or sophistication. In the right visual context — the right lighting, the right outfit — a cigarette still reads as worldly, adult, a little dangerous.
The Reality Behind Global Smoking Trends
Here's where the data complicates the vibe. If smoking looks like it's everywhere, the numbers say the opposite is happening.
Global smoking rates are declining long-term. The WHO's latest report has worldwide tobacco use falling from 1.38 billion users in 2000 to 1.2 billion in 2024 — about one in five adults, down from one in three. In the United States, just 9.8% of adults smoked in 2024, an all-time low, down from 10.8% the year before and from 24% in 1998.
Health policies keep discouraging it. The decline is engineered: smoke-free spaces, advertising bans, warnings, and steep taxes. Notably, the overwhelming majority of lifelong smokers start before age 18 — which is exactly why so much public health policy targets young people.
Social stigma has increased. Stepping outside to smoke now reads faintly as something that is bucking at or challenging societal norms — which, ironically, is part of the appeal we keep circling. The stigma didn't kill the cool; it relocated it.
Coolness doesn't track with usage. Some crowds carry a perception filter and others don't. My friends in Bali will do some of the hardest workouts I've ever seen and then light a cig — nobody's really judging what's cool anymore, otherwise ice baths would have minimized half our friend groups.
Visual presence outruns behavioral adoption. The image travels faster than the habit. A Vanity Fair cover or a Saint Laurent front row is loud — but it's visibility, not a behavior trend.
So, Is Smoking Cool Again
Per the data, no. But something IS resurfacing, and the resurgence of smoking we keep hearing about isn't really about nicotine.
The cigarette has always carried more than smoke. It's ritual — a reason to step outside, take a breath, leave your desk, talk to a stranger. The smoke break is one of the few socially sanctioned pauses left in modern life. So maybe what's coming back isn't the cigarette itself, but the needs it has always served: rebellion, ritual, connection, and permission to slow down. I mean, most 20-year-olds I talk to are stressed trying to build a new app, keep up with AI, or have gone completely apathetic.
The healthier middle ground between obsessive wellness and outright rebellion probably isn't found in the cigarette. It's found in giving ourselves the things the cigarette stands in for — the pause, the permission, the human moment — without confusing all the optimization for actually living.
But none of this is a permission slip. The facts haven't changed: smoking - the combustion of nicotine.- is still harmful to your body, and nicotine is real, fast, and habit-forming. What I'd push back on is how readily we demonize it while waving through other engineered indulgences — the daily sugar, the McDonald's or Starbucks run — that pull on the very same reward circuitry. To me they're closer cousins than we like to admit. The point isn't to excuse any of it; it's to know it fully, and then weigh every choice the way you'd weigh anything else: against your total toxic load. Not just the physical, but the social and emotional toll too. Chronic stress, isolation, and a life with no pauses carry a body burden of their own. Real wellness isn't pretending the cigarette — or the cheeseburger — is harmless. It's being honest about every input, and deciding with your eyes open what's actually worth it for you.
Because, as I always say: there's no reason to be good if you can't be bad — as long as you know exactly what you're choosing.
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