Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Is Smoking "Chic"?

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Hello EICiggies, Is smoking cool again? Was it ever? With smoking once again at the epicentre of celebrity chic we asked YOU whether or not you think people are picking up their lighters and throwing away their cares. And if so, are we experiencing a trickle down from celebs which is reversing decades of public health campaigns? We also reflect on our own relationships with smoking, how our attitudes towards smoking have changed through the years and how smoking has come to re-enter the mainstream. It’s the comeback that none of us expected. Can we attribute the rise of smoking as an aesthetic marker to a resistance to wellness, a natural bedfellow to the rise of diet culture - or are the famous people to blame? We consider the measures that can be put in place to stop it. Hope you enjoy the episode and as always, please rate, review follow, subscribe and share the show. We're an indie podcast and it means the world & helps us keep going. O, R, B xLinksinews - Smoking is cool again. How embarrassing. Grazia - What's With All The Performative Smoking?ASH - Use of vapes and other novel tobacco and nicotine products among adults in Great BritainInstagram - @cigfluencers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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And Swift furniture is also perfect for renters because you don't need any special drills or tools to assemble anything and so the pieces take minutes to put together. And we have a special 10% off code for you too. Just head to swifthome.com forward slash pages forward slash EIC dash podcast. That's Swift, SWYFT to unlock your exclusive discount code. Do not worry. We'll leave the link in the bio and you'll even get an email with the pieces we handpicked when you sign up. I'm Beth. I'm Richerra and I'm anoni. And this is everything in conversation. The nicotine of pop culture content keeping your discourse cravings at bay until Friday. In case you missed it, Everything Is Content is now on substack at Everything Is Content Pod.

If you search that, you should find us, but we will also obviously, of course, add a link in the show notes as well. That's where we'll be uploading even more pop culture analysis, essays, interviews, reviews, plus even more recommendations of TV shows, films, books, long reads and so much more. So far we've written about Ariana Grande and the discourse around her body, our nostalgia for pre-tradwife era, and smart glasses and surveillance culture. That's Everything is Content Pod, which is also how you can find and follow us on Instagram and TikTok. Is smoking cool again? Was it ever? Well, according to a recent piece in iNews by Sarah Carson, smoking is yet again the epicenter of Celebrity Sheik. It's at risk of trickling down to the rest of us. She writes,

The cigarette is no longer only the accessory of choice it girls like Alexa Chung, whose aloofness has always been part of her brand, but for women as unmysterious as Kylie Jenner, posing with one on the cover of Vanity Fair and as commercially engineered as Sabrina Carpenter, who smokes them in music videos. What used to be a celebrity's secret vice is instead part of the unapologetic package. The stigma has lifted. Ordinary people who would have deleted votes themselves on nights out in clouds of smoke and fear of their mother's retribution and now passing around vogue on silver platters at their weddings, offering monogram matches as a party favour. We should be deeply alarmed by smoking's insidious acceptability.

We rail against the ills of social media and technology, revenge, porn, cyberbullying, AI chatbots telling young people to kill themselves. I don't see anywhere near enough outrage about the creeping prevalence of cigarettes on line, she writes. In June, Grazziah published their own piece called What's With All the Performative Smoking, using the moment that Madonna and Charlie XX lit up while sitting front row at the San Laurent Men's Wear Show in Paris as one example. My former colleague, who should definitely all go follow, author Nikki Peach, wrote, quote, between Haley Bieber holding a cigarette on the cover of interview magazine in April, Addison Ray smoking two cigarettes at once in the music video for

Aquamarine, and Kylie Jenner posting photos of a cigarette. dangling from her lips for her 382 million followers on Instagram. Aesthetic nicotine consumption is having something of a renaissance. So the eye paper uploaded an Instagram post promoting their article and one comment underneath really stood out. It read, quote, you bring back dangerously skinny as a fashion choice, smoking comes with it. Interestingly enough, a lot of you had to this point. We will get into it, but it seems to be a connection that a lot of people are making. And it is certainly no secret that celebrity women are shrinking, very wavefish, thin bodies are making a comeback on runways

on screen and in the content we all consume on our phones around the clock. Maybe there is something in this idea that alongside Herron Sheik and White UK fashion, smoking cigarettes has re-entered our pop culture cycle. That being said, it is worth noting that despite an apparent increase in photos of celebrities and influence of smoking, cigarette smoking currently remains at a long-term low. So in the 1970s, about half of all adults in Great Britain smoke cigarettes. And by 2023, this had fallen to just 12% of men and 10% of women. And this is a result of public health efforts, warnings on packs, bans on advertising, restrictions on indoor smoking, and the availability of tools like nicotine patches

and medications to help people quit. As for vaping, an ASH survey found that 10% of adults in the UK vape, and that's an estimated 5.5 million people, of whom are speaking. And of current vapors, 60% used to smoke cigarettes, but have now quit, also present. Oh, have you quit? She quit cigarettes. Oh, sorry. And actually, not even, because if Beth hands me, are Benson Hedges. Or a Vogue. Do you remember we smoked, we outsmoked that girls, but she was offering them, was a lovely listener, and she was a, she's now a friend of the pod.

But anyway, listen, we will get into her and Harvard. I mean, a Vogue doesn't count. That being said, guys, I think it isn't, well, that's get into it, but a vogue is, you know, what's a vogue? Already a micro discourse around what is a cigarette of what really is not a cigarette. Apparently Vogue's not. You know what is so funny? I was thinking about this and I definitely have noticed all of the kind of aesthetic markers that the pieces talk about. The main one was having planned a wedding, just somebody asked me, oh, you're going to do the silver tray with cigarettes?

And I was like, probably not because my parents are there and all my family from India. but it's definitely become, and I honestly mean this with no judgment, but it has become a bit of a wedding trope, like that Instagram Carousel, the one picture of the small cigarette platter, and the matchboxes. So that one is a really interesting one because a wedding doesn't really seem like a cigarette place, but it's become super-cigretty, and I think it genuinely is because of Charlie XX,

which is a wild link to make that within a year that can become an aesthetic thing because of one celebrity doing it. I was going to actually say, I do think the real epidemic is marathons, though. I feel like all of my friends have quit smoking and they're doing marathons. So that's my actual... Guilty. Concern about the world, joking.

But what do you guys think? Do you think this is a real epidemic of people picking up smoking or the fashionableness of it kind of coming more in vogue? Do you know what's so funny? So I did use to smoke. I used to be terrified, like she says in a piece, that my mum singing the picture. So I'd always hold my cigarettes by my hand behind my back, sorry, we'd like cropped them out. And then I think it was 2022. I had admittedly been on an all-nighter.

I was with my friends and we reels were just like becoming a thing. So we made a real of us all like smoking on a balcony and I captioned it. I've quit vaping thinking it was really funny. And I got hundreds of comments for people being like, this is so irresponsible. I can't believe you post yourself smoking, blah, blah. And it was honestly great. It was like the most backlash I've ever got about anything.

And then looking back, I'm like, that is so weird. Why did I do that? I thought it was being really funny. It was in my 20s. Anyway, so to see the full circle event now of them becoming props of this kind of, it's not even a moral panic. It is a panic. Smoking is really bad.

As much as I joke about it, like, I wish I was not addicted to nicotine. It is one of the biggest baines of my life. And it's something that I would love to quit. But having absorbed nicotine into my body for near on 18 years, it's quite hard to kind of get off it. But there has been a massive cultural shift away from that kind of shaming to this very strange and I think it is kind of performativeness around smoking and I don't know if you guys have seen it people do comment on it but there's a specific way that American young adults smoke

that leads me to believe that they're not actually smoking and they're just kind of holding the cigarette so there's something really fascinating going on with smoking and I don't even know if everyone who's smoking in vertical commas is actually smoking and I don't know what's weirder I mean just to catch everyone up about my own nicotine habit I did smoke for all of my 20s up until I was 20, well, a year of the pandemic, 2020, so I must have been 26, 27. And I was a beneficiary of a non-smoking public health campaign, which was the banning of clickable menthol cigarettes because that's what I smoked. And they banned them. And I said, oh, right, I'm not smoking anymore. And I quit cold turkey that day, didn't have a single cigarette

for five, I think it was four or five years. Four years, actually, because then I, I, one of my book comes out and I said, finally I can have my, I can live in the world I want to live in, which is I get to have Siggy's on holiday and I get to have Sigis as a treat, maybe once a month. And it's how I live now. And I am in between that time, I got addicted to vaping and I didn't mean to. And it was harder to quit that than it was to quit smoking. I went utterly cold turkey. And now I will have a little sip on a vape, but I have not bought a vape in months. And I'm very keen not to do that. So I'm in the privileged position of not being addicted to nicotine. and feeling very confident that I won't be, again, unless I buy a vape, that will tip me over the edge.

But I can have a cigarette. And so I feel like I've seen all sides to this. My favorite brand of message that we got was from people saying, smoking is disgusting. I've never smoked. I never will. It's foul. It kills you. It stinks. But it is cool. It made me laugh so much how many people were kind of like, I'm sorry, but it is elegant. We had a message from Amy who said, never smoked, hate the smell. I'm cancer bio PhD. And yet they look elegant. never be me though. Ian said, never smoked a cigarette my life, probably never will. Still think smoking is aesthetically the coolest thing you can do. Like hate it, loathe it and be addicted to it, not. There is something about it that for some people visually, and it must be, you know, the media,

whatever, the fact that it is bad for you, the way that you hold it, the smoke, I don't know. There's something about it that triggers a beauty response in people's brains. Well, I think in culture in films, it's gorgeous women like breakfast said Tiffany's and they'd have the cigarette on the long cigarette holder thing. And I do think it is the way you're a way you're your mouth moves and you're letting the smoke out and it kind of there is something. I think it's, first of all, it's, they've been marketed to be sexy. Like original kind of cigarette campaigns were all about the kind of sexy gorgeousness of it. It's funny because when you are a smoker and when I was a smoker, which was up until 23,

as in 20 a day I was getting through them. I felt repulsed by myself. I was out there at 7 a.m. with my black coffee puffing away in my pajamas. Wow. And when you see people kind of out the corners of their office buildings trying to hide away because actually one of the amazing things that will help curb this is so many places, including outdoor spaces now, don't let you smoke. So you kind of have to be like a pariah and go and stand on the curb.

Like you have to leave the premises even if it's outside. And so when you see smoking in real life now, I think it quite infrequently does it actually look chic. Where it does look chic is online where everyone's kind of Ryan Murphying up their feeds and in Paris, obviously, which is I do smoke when I'm in Paris. French lady's doing it. Sorry, that is chic. Yeah, no, I don't know. You are right. Something about Paris specifically is like, it looks good.

Something about the city's colouring, the backdrop, it looks especially good there. It slaps. It looks right. It looks right. Yeah. It's like fish and chips. It's like Paris and six. I've never been a proper smoker. I've had like drunk cigarettes now and again. So I feel like for me, especially like, I don't know, the night out scene, all of that stuff being linked to and like never really having a daytime one, to be honest, because it just doesn't, it never used to appeal to me in the same way. And now I've completely cut that off, I think just like being really

health conscious and just kind of being a bit like, I can't really play around with this. It's not fun if I'm especially not addicted to it. There's no point for me whatsoever. I have a bit of a weird relationship to it. Seeing how it's become really stylized and aesthetic and things like that, it feels like an antithesis to all of our obsession about wellness as well. And I wonder what is going on between those two things. Like I said, I know I was joking, but there is definitely an epidemic of marathon runners. They all need to stop. But at the same time, there's like all of this anti-wellness imagery. And I think it's probably the subversion of the mainstream fixation with health and longevity and all that kind of stuff. Anything that is the mainstream, the opposite suddenly becomes

cool. Suddenly because everyone was smoking, not smoking, was suddenly like the interesting thing to make your personality. Now everyone's obsessed with their health and weight training, which is great, looking after themselves, supplementing, peptiding, black marketing, whatever. It kind of feels like to be really subversive is to just say, I don't give a shit, I want to fuck my body up. We had a must from Jessica kind of on this. She says, I've definitely noticed this. I'd never thought I'd see the rides of smoking again. And I think it's a rejection of the self-optimization culture. People just want to be a bit reckless and free again. Everything got so serious. The wild has already burned. metaphorically and not, what harm is the siggy on a night out really going to do? This is a rhetoric that

we have quite brazenly peddled on this podcast where we've said, you know, don't not go on a night out because you're worried about your health, you're worried about embarrassing yourself, you're worried about being drunk. I do think that is an element to it. I do also wonder if the rise of GLP ones, which mean that people don't have to be fit and healthy to achieve the kind of body that they want, if that is the reason that they are partaking an exercise, means that it's a reason that it gives people the possibility of appearing in what is perceived by certain people to look fit and well whilst behaving in ways that aren't like actually good for your body, e.g. smoking, partying, not sleeping that much, things that would normally like raise your cortisol,

maybe inhibit your ability to build muscle, lose weight, whatever it might be. I think that's a part of it. I don't mind people when they smoke. I don't mind. I really don't see an issue. I'm like, whatever. So many people that do smoke are people that are our generation that smoke when they're younger, they get on it, they got off it. I do take an issue with celebrities kind of performative. I am actually bored of it because also they have so much money. If they end up with some kind of smoking related illness, they will be able to get like private healthcare for it. A lot of people smoke for various different reasons, but lots of people smoking might be a real pleasure for them. It might be an addiction. It might be something that helps them get through the day.

But for people that don't smoke, to be encouraged to smoke by celebrities, who are essentially not protected from, because you can never be protected from illness associated with smoking, but you certainly could be more protected than some of the young people that you're encouraging to go out and buy cigarettes, who if you've never had a cigarette, it's not the time to start. Oh yeah, I mean, most people, and as I'm at the top, most people don't smoke, but there is a sense here of asking what the effect is.

I mean, just like argued in our first Everything's Content, subsect piece about Ariana Grande, there is a contagion factor to thinness and dieting that means it is actually our business when we are seeing, you know, this many photos of very, very thin celebrities. We live downstream of them. Their behaviour, their trends become ours, but like you say, without the protection of their money. And that impacts young people, normally young women, first and it impacts them worst. And maybe here, even though, you know, we're fans of Charlie X. She makes music for adults. She is, but she is also the epicenter of cool culture. Children do not have their separate

internet. Teenagers do not have a separate internet. They are receiving the same things. We do. And in a world where, you know, smoking has become this glamorous, rarefied thing that even if someone holds a cigarette, you know, says, oh, I'll just smoke on nights out because it's quite cool to do that. That's not how addiction works. Addiction can take hold, even if you do something post ironically. And I think it's silly to think that things couldn't. I know at the moment it doesn't seem to have encouraged Gen Z to take up smoking on mass, but I think it's silly to say it could have no impact. And I think in the absence of tobacco advertisers on, you know, the tubes and on the tubes, on the tube and in magazines and whatever else, actually these celebrities doing it, seeing photos of gorgeous

starlets, smoking cigarettes, the tobacco companies who are so restricted from doing advertising must be sort of rubbing their nipples in glee. So linked to what you were saying and only about beauty and Zempic and all these kind of things, Grace Messaged in and said, this feels like another beauty trend, sold to women that is awful for our health. I might have missed it, but I haven't seen as much recent imagery of men smoking. This must be related to the rise of diet culture too. Ultimately, we get to decide what's cool and I'm choosing to not find this cool. Smoking gives a sort of, I don't care vibe. I hate that that seems to be the fashionable vibe to give off. And then Amelia said, I don't think smoking was ever uncool, just not clean girl, which some of us have

never prescribed to, lull. I think that is a really interesting point because a lot of the imagery I do see of celebrities as female celebrities with a cigarette in their hand. I can't. really think of the men. Where are the men in it? It might just be that my feed, my world is a feminine female world. But I do think it is the Sabrina Carpenter's. It's the Addison Wraise. It's the Jewelie Pirs. It's the Charlie's. It's the women. Even Housewives, this is a really silly example, but there used to be this account I followed that was called Housewives Secretly Smoking or something like that. And it would be these candid shots of people capturing a housewife secretly smoking behind the cameras.

Now, do you mean real housewives or just women in their homes? Sorry, real housewives, yeah. Oh, right. I was like, oh my God, they're going to catch me. Women in their homes are also real housewives. Well, not to rude, not to rude. Yeah, don't be so rude. Real housewives are real housewives and housewives are real housewives.

Okay, no, real housewives. Essentially, now they've just started openly smoking on TV because I think they realize that a lot of people were using the pictures, re-sharing them and just being like, oh my God, Dorek chemistry is so iconic for this. Now she just does it on screen. on TV. So is this more trickling of like no longer fearing the backlash, kind of embracing it as being an iconic image of, you know, a woman having a nervous breakdown smoking a SIGY on screen? That is so interesting. I haven't watched The Real Housewives recently, but I'm really surprised they

show it because I remember when Love Island finally stopped them all smoking around the fire pit, which meant you barely saw half the show because that's all they used to do. And I think it's so funny because as someone who vapes, and I do think it's embarrassing, but I do conceal it in my hand really well. My friend's always, I didn't even know you had it there, because it is like yummy air battery. On the coolness of it all, we had a message from Caitlin that said, it definitely feels like it's a reaction to vaping, which has become associated with teenagers. Smoking is now the more alternative choice. And then Emily sent in this bit from a Jemai McCirk interview, which always makes me laugh. So Jemai McCirk said in the interview, I mean, it's the worst of both worlds,

because you're not smoking and you look stupid, right? Smoking a cigarette, there's something sort of timeless about it. When someone's smoking a vape, I sense a sort of desperation. Like, you really need that. This isn't glamorous. It's like you're pressing a button in the hospital for more drugs. And they look horrible. They look like USBs or car parts.

And she's right. I am puffing on this, yeah. I'm sucking that for all it's worth. It is terrible. But what I think about the smoking thing that is so interesting is so many celebrities used to smoke. And we were talking about men, I just remembered those pictures of like Jennifer Anderson and Brad Pitt smoking. But when everyone smoked, if you saw like a pat picture of them smoking, it was so ambient because everyone was doing it.

What's so weird about this current iteration is with all of the pop idols, pop icons that you just listed for Tura, it's very much like it's an active choice. They are including them as props within their music videos, within their artistries. It is a considered decision. that's, I think, where it's cringe and not cool. I did, used to love it when I used to smoke. I sometimes used to Google celebrities that smoke. I remember finding out that Kate Winslet smoke for years. I loved seeing a picture of a really, a bit like the Doreet thing.

I used to love it when you'd see a picture of a celebrity you'd never expect to smoke having a SIGI. That filled me with a bit of joy, and I like the fact that they were also hiding around the back of the bin to do it because I think you should do it filled with shame unless you're in a private environment because I just think it's irresponsible. I remember being a child.

I was really anti-smoking as a child. and I remember Googling because I used to be so betrayed when a celebrity I love. But it was so funny, but there was a site which now I'm thinking, was it kind of fetish site? Because it was a list of all these images of smoking celebrities. And I used to be like, when I found out Jennifer Anderson, I went with burst of tears because I was such a friend's fan. Then I went into my doubt and I went, oh, smoking happens and I was sort of into not. And now I'm not a smoker. I kind of feel the fondness again.

Do you know there is an account on Instagram called At Sig Fluences, which I only realized after I've done all the research for this episode. I was like, oh my God, it was all here. And it is, it's a fascinating look at how many people have posted their photos on their own socials. How many people have used it in music videos and front covers of magazines and stuff? And also, very occasionally you will see someone who looks like they've been caught out smoking, like behind the bin shot. But most of them are posed and intentionally released. It's so funny that it is now, it functions as a prop that does communicate to their audiences, something that they obviously have decided is valuable because they wouldn't do it.

there was a time when you wouldn't do it because it would tank your credibility or people would have such a negative reaction. Now it seems that that is so different. I think it's just so funny. I mean, I would go and look at Sig Fulences and you'll see what I mean. It's absolutely kind of alarming how many people post them now. I honestly almost got cancelled for that real. I went and looked at it up before we did this episode. I don't know.

It was actually, it was nuts. Like I would, there's no way if I can't, maybe it was like 20-21. If we teleported back now and told me that we were doing this episode, then I'd be like, there's no. Like the level. And it's funny, Beth, you said that when you're younger, you hate to smoking. I was such a little brat. I used to like, if my sister's fans were smoking, I'd get their packet of cigarettes and run them under a tap. What? I used to do things like that. And then like three years later, I was smoking. So it was all pointless. Same, same. Oh, it's so funny. I mean, we got so many messages. We've done this in part, but I think the connecting it to chic and skinny culture, I think some of the messages were just, it was pretty much the most common connection that we got. Kate said partly feels linked to the skinny trend, appetite's present and part of a similar aesthetic, and people are connecting it to her and chic 90s revival. I'm certain there is something of that.

I just don't want to scaremonger and say, because smoking is kind of, I think it's probably a little bit more to do with the apathy and the nihilism, not the nihilism, but the sort of like, God, things are really bad. I can't actually live well enough to fix this earth. Maybe I can have balance in, I mean, not to speak her name,

but a certain goopy woman talking about, how balance, how she achieved balance in her life of having a cigarette but also doing yoga. I think that is where we're at. I think we've just broken. I don't think it's only connected to the appetite suppressant. I think I don't want to definitively say that that is all that's going on, even though absolutely in some of these tumbler-esque pictures, it's definitely communicating that. I think some people genuinely have just got fed up, like we say with optimising culture, and think I want an indulgence for myself, not to downplay the addiction aspect at all. But I think some people are saying, do you know what?

I would like three martinis some Friday afternoons. And I would like a little siggy. And I would also like to, you know, care about my life. I think you can do both. I can't remember if I've said this before. But John Robbins said that I think it was a therapist. Someone said to him, he was like, I find it really hard to quit smoking. He's explaining it.

And the woman went, it's because when you smoke, you're really bad at breathing. But when you smoke, you're doing breath work. Because you go outside into a place where there's no one else. You leave the stressful situation. You do a deep inhale and exhale. And it was a really funny thing. I think smoking when we come out, the sort of like commercialisation pop-star-ness of it is also a break. It's breathing.

It's taking yourself outside of a stressful situation. Like there's lots of sort of psychological things that are attached to cigarettes beyond the smoking and the sort of like performativeness of it. There's lots of reasons why we love them. But you shouldn't. It shouldn't. Don't do it. No, that is really real. Like breathwork is amazing.

It is like generally life-changing. It can make you feel completely different. It's so. It's so powerful. You're so right. And I've had so many people tell me that where they're like, oh, I just kind of realized that it actually was the deep breaths in. Once I quit, I could just keep doing that. And then I kind of got the same thing. And I actually felt better. I felt like loads of the bits of the smoking were gone that I hated. If I tried to replace vaping with breathwork, I would be going all day. Oh, no. So obviously, there's new measures being put in place to try and

actively tackle younger generations, including the fact that anyone born after 2009 will not legally be allowed to buy a cigarette. Do you think those measures are just going to push people to buy them in different means? There's obviously concerns about black market, purchasing, all those kind of things. I swear to God, I've seen Los Marys, which are obviously illegal now being sold in various ways. So Los Marys aren't illegal. What's illegal is the ones that you throw away. Oh, they're just supposed to be. They look exactly the same. Oh, okay. That's what got me. Because I thought, okay, brilliant, I'm about to buy this anymore. That's what I thought as well.

Well, they introduced this law in Australia ages ago because I think it actually was around the time that my sister lives there and I think it was like years and years and years ago and I remember being like, I can't believe they're doing this. And I think it has made a massive difference. I should probably look that up, but I'm fairly certain because I think with smoking, the thing is

no one likes it when you first try it. And if it's a really big cultural thing you want to do it, unfortunately this is what these celebrities are endorsing. But at school, we used to get someone's granny's silk up purples. We'd go and sit behind a bush. We'd inhale one puff each, get really high and then feel really sick and it was rank. And we probably had to smoke about five cigarettes before we genuinely could stomach the disgustingness of it.

And then once you get past that, you can become a smoker. Some people didn't. Most girls that I knew in my year were smokers. If that becomes eradicated from schools and there isn't access, if there isn't this community of people smoking, I do genuinely think it will just die out with a generation. I think it's an incredible thing to happen. But I also think it's the right thing to do because you cannot deprive people in active. nicotine addiction from access to cigarettes. So I actually think that is probably the one measure

that will work if they don't exist. To make them prohibitively expensive, we already have cost-effective cheap vapes so that people with an addiction to smoking can vape. And I know that there's a lot of misinformation and uncertainty there. But basically what we know about vaping, it is less dangerous and taxing on your lungs and your body, less chances of COPD than if you smoke cigarettes. So we do have the alternatives. You know, I agree completely. you cannot, a lot of people just think you need to ban them now, you just remove the source. It's the same. You can't do that for alcohol. You can't do that for drugs. I'm very pro-legalizing drugs. Not so we can all get on at an avatty, but so that people in addition are made safer. And it's the same with smoking. I do, I mean, I think we'll grow up with people, people will get addicted to nicotine. They'll just be addicted to nicotine in the form of vapes, which I'm not going to say better or worse, but it kind of does feel better in terms of at least potential impact on a body. I hope so much that that is the case. But young people will, if they don't smoke, they'll vape. I think we're going to have to donate. I think we're going to have to donate. my body to medical science when I die and find out. Because I was a really earlier doctor of vaping.

So whatever vaping is going to do to us, it's done it to me. It's definitely better in the ways that we know it's better than smoking. But there's absolutely some really unknowns about breathing in, flavored air from a battery into your body. It's not right. What do you mean? It grows on a tree, obviously. Well, I spoke because that's the thing, I guess.

Maybe this is part of it is what I bet part of the smoking thing is actually, weirdly, the health thing where people are going cigarettes are natural tobacco is made from a plant you know the people that are doing kind of like well it's actually in a way it is it's kind of come full circle to cigarettes are actually healthy now because of the people that want like single ingredients stuff so oh it's not upyf tobacco and paper people were talking about how they would sit in because you sit in your bed and suck on a vape the amount of tobacco that you know sorry the amount of nicotine that you can take into your body and the addiction that you can have as much higher I will have you know, if it's raining, it's like, well, I'm not going outside today. It's not a cigarette time

for me, whereas if I'm having a babe, I'll do that on the toilet. My thing about the smoking ban always just makes me laugh. I mean, I think it's great and it's effective and whatever else. It just makes me laugh imagining like an 80-year-old who was born like one year before the cutout, like waiting outside of a shop and asking like an 81-year-old, like, can you come and get me some sickies? Please. It's just so funny that that is a lot. I mean, obviously, that will be a million pounds by then, but it's just so funny. So before we round off, we had a really good message from Ronnie who said, I work in public health around tobacco, so this is something I feel quite strongly about. We're trying to do so much to help people to stop smoking, including the government, putting

significant funding into stop smoking and now stop vaping services, because we know how much ill health is caused by smoking, how much it contributes to health inequalities and how bad it is for the environment. If celebrities want to smoke, that's obviously their choice and I don't expect them to be role models, but actively portraying smoking as something cool or glamorous really doesn't sit well with me when so much work is going into helping people quit. There's also the growing issue of illicit tobacco in the UK as smoking becomes more expensive. We genuinely don't know what's in some of these products. I've had colleagues involved in warehouse raids, find things like mice droppings and pesticides in the cigarettes.

Oh, that is really, really grim. Do you remember, though, that one of the early public health, campaigns that we had around my secondary school that said, like, listed all the ingredients in a cigarette, which included like formaldehyde and like cement. I mean, not that, but something like that. I actually think when you're that addicted to cigarettes, you go, oh, mouth droppings. Well, that's organic. This is the thing. It just doesn't, it's so, addiction is so interesting, but like I really am genuinely addicted to nicotine. And Lena Dunham, I think we spoke about this, but someone she knew, or someone from below deck or someone had a heart attack related to

vaping. And I read it when I was on the train somewhere. And I thought, well, that's it. I've got to quit. About 20 minutes later, I was vapid. I just thought, oh well. I'm actually, it's addiction. I don't. It wasn't. But yeah, it overrides any logic in your brain. And I mean, touch with, thank God, my addiction is something that really only harms me. It's such a complex topic, but it is I, for one, I don't think smoking is cool or uncool. I think the celebs have just got to stop. It's just, I think it's uncool to be irresponsible. But then actually I say that. I'm like, It's so fun. Just be fan. Oh, I don't know. I don't have a point of view. Luckily, we are. We won't post ourselves smoking because we've got, you know, we've got big influence.

It's us and Kylie Jenner that could stop this. We're going to stop this. But if you see me out, I'm having one. Well, mind your business. Thank you so much for listening. And for all of your opinions and takes on this topic, we loved hearing your thoughts. And we really appreciate all of the messages. So thank you. Please do follow us on Instagram and TikTok and substack at Everything's Content. for more content to take part in these conversations and to get a peep inside our minds through our words. It is horrifying. We would also truly, truly appreciate it if you could leave us a cheeky five-star rating or a six-star rating if they let you do that or even a review on Apple.

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