"Need a cigarette to make me feel better," Addison Rae sings in her 2025 hit song “Headphones On.” It’s a line that might have felt a bit dated a few years ago, but lately, a lot of people, especially in pop culture, apparently agree. The cigarette has worked its way back into the zeitgeist, dangling from the fingers of main characters in Heated Rivalry and Love Story, and in images of hot, young stars like Hudson Williams, Omar Apollo, Connor Storrie, and Charli xcx having a smoke.
For a while, it looked like cigarettes were on their way out. Anti-smoking campaigns of the late ’90s and early ’00s seemed to be working in the US. And, more recently, analysis by the New York City Health Department found that its anti-smoking campaigns helped 8,000 New Yorkers quit between 2015–2019. Then vaping arrived.
"Just like cigarettes were once marketed in the mid-20th century as modern and even healthy, vapes were introduced as the safer alternative to smoking," Jess Britvich, a content creator known for blending GRWM videos with commentary on internet politics, tells Teen Vogue. By the time the data came in that vapes were thought to have a negative impact on the heart and lungs, members of a new generation were already getting addicted to nicotine. In 2024, 410,000 (3.5%) middle school students and 1.21 million (7.8%) high school students in the US reported using e-cigarettes.
The post-COVID wellness boom, perhaps best exemplified by the clean-girl trend, urged young people to be hypervigilant about health and endlessly optimize their physical appearance. But their quest for poreless skin and “Pilates bodies” was often expensive and required more free time than a lot of people had. As a result of this burnout, it seems, a messy, cigarette-smoking party girl has materialized.
“In some ways, the resurgence of smoking likely represents a form of counterculture. It can function as a pushback against the relentless health trends and optimization culture that dominate social media,” Dr. Jeff Yoo, MD, ER physician and a clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, tells Teen Vogue.
Smoking fits into the recent trend of “wellness anarchism,” a term coined in 2025, in which a healthy lifestyle is balanced with the occasional vice. But some smokers take this a step further, arguing online that smoking cannot only exist within a healthy lifestyle but actively contribute to your well-being.
“What concerns me most is that smoking is sometimes framed online as a form of stress relief, focus enhancement, or even self-care,” says Dr. Yoo, “which runs completely counter to what decades of medical evidence show."
Part of this is manifested in the idea of a smoke break: a small, indulgent pause in the daily grind. During the pandemic, Puff Bar marketed its e-cigarettes as the “perfect escape” from “WFH stress,” and a way to “stay sane.” In a viral reel, nutrition scientist Inge van der Wurff jokes that smoking is “genius” because it “gives you the right to…have a minute for yourself and do breathwork.” The clip itself is anti-smoking, but the comments section is filled with people who agree that cigarettes help regulate their nervous system. “It’s a pause,” one user wrote. “Under capitalism, we’re not allowed to do this.”
Besides mental well-being, some smokers online also promote the physical effects of smoking. Weight loss is frequently cited as a reason people start smoking, and a fear of weight gain as a major reason they hesitate to quit. This association also spreads to related products like nicotine pouches, including Zyn (nicknamed “O-Zyn-pic”), which has been labeled online as a cost-friendlier dupe for GLP-1 medications. “In a culture that increasingly values being skinny over almost anything else, it’s not surprising that the health effects get overlooked,” says Britvich.
The fixation on appetite suppression may also suggest that the pressure to self-optimize hasn’t disappeared so much as slipped into a different outfit.
Britvich explains that although the clean-girl and party-girl aesthetics seem like the antitheses of each other, they value similar metrics. “They both require a certain body type (the reaction to a skinny woman smoking and a plus-size woman smoking would be completely different), and even the same could be said about race.”
Dr. Yoo warns, “If someone begins smoking or using nicotine regularly for weight control, they may end up trading a manageable issue like weight for a much more serious and lifelong health risk, such as a heart attack or stroke.”
Rather than drive the wellness industry, you might say that Big Tobacco, which consists of the world’s biggest cigarette-manufacturing companies, sits in its sidecar. You go to Pilates and get a matcha to cancel out last night’s cigarette, and both industries make money. TikTok is full of videos of young women joking that they embody “balance” because they earn their smoke breaks by going for a run. The tone is playful, but these videos demonstrate a very real concept known as “licensing,” in which a positive choice allows you to grant yourself permission for a more harmful one.
Yet lighting up can still carry the charge of defiance for young progressives, especially women. To be a chain-smoking party girl, photographed smoking on a nightclub toilet, may feel like a rejection of the expectation to be a butter-churning housewife. But in a time when reproductive rights are being stripped back, smoking can also take on a warped sense of physical autonomy—a way for women to assert ownership over their bodies, even if the act itself is self-destructive.
“Right now there’s so much rhetoric,” says Britvich, “so many trends, and even policy conversations, pushing us toward these visions of domesticity. Smoking is kind of anti-that. I think it becomes a way to push back against those expectations.”
The right, meanwhile, has been winning campaign donations. In the 2024 presidential race, the largest corporate donor was a subsidiary of Reynolds American—the tobacco giant behind brands like Newport cigarettes, Camel cigarettes, Pall Mall cigarettes, Lucky Strike cigarettes, and Natural American Spirit—which put $10 million behind Donald Trump’s MAGA campaign.
Fighting the idea of smoking as a wellness aid requires a baseline faith in institutions, including the medical establishment—a faith that parts of the right have spent years eroding. Doctors and public-health officials are trying to counter the new wave of nicotine use, but, as Dr. Yoo puts it, the internet has its own incentives. “The challenge is that nuanced scientific discussions are far less likely to go viral than a 10-second sound-bite [about] nicotine helping someone focus, or a photo of an A-list celebrity smoking.”
The tobacco industry has long needed new lungs. According to the American Lung Association’s analysis of CDC data, smoking rates among adults plummeted from 42.6% in 1965 to 11.6% in 2022—a 73% drop. The tobacco industry has long targeted younger consumers, with an 1984 R.J. Reynolds report stating that “the brand loyalty of 18-year-old smokers far outweighs any tendency to switch with age. [...] If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline, just as a population which does not give birth will eventually dwindle.”
Since then, advertising laws have made it harder to directly target young people, but social media remains a wilder frontier. Over half of US adolescents report seeing smoking promoted in social media posts and online ads, which sometimes come in the form of celebrity-brand collaborations.
But social media doesn’t show what happens beyond the flashy photos. Says Dr. Yoo, "In the ER, I see many young people who use nicotine pouches, vape, or smoke cigarettes, far more than I did 10 years ago.”
