Oh, Lord. Smoking Is Cool Again

We really should have seen the cigarette’s resurgence coming.

If pertussis and polio, measles and mumps can return from the brink of extinction, largely due to loss of faith in public health advice, then smoking — the leading preventable cause of disability, disease, and death worldwide — was bound to emerge from its flop era too.

Quitting is difficult. I should know, having quit several times since I picked up the habit, way back in my twenties. I don’t smoke anymore, though. My last cigarette was four months ago, thanks in large part to British Columbia’s smoking cessation program, QuitNow, which supplies me with what seems to be an infinite supply of Nicorette.

It’s peculiar, leaving the drugstore, my black backpack bulging with government-subsidized gum.

But the service makes sense, as it’s cheaper to pay for whatever I need to quit now than to subsidize all the additional health care I’ll need after smoking my whole adult life.

Illnesses related to tobacco cost the federal government upwards of $2.3 billion a year. A box of Nicorette is roughly $60. The math is really mathing, as they say. And the program is working for me.

Meanwhile, it seems as though popular culture is working against me. It’s hard to ignore that I’m quitting while swimming upstream.

The cigarette is back in fashion, suddenly ubiquitous on Instagram, where “cigfluencers” — that’s what these sexy celebrity smokers are called — rehabilitate the habit for another generation.

Perhaps the greatest cigfluencer of the modern era is the British pop musician Charli XCX, whose latest release, Music, Fashion, Film, is a vibe, in the vein of her best-selling 2024 album brat; and whose Rolling Stone cover, on checkout stands now, centres and accentuates the cigarette that dangles from her mouth. A highly provocative choice, and a rare one, these days.

Plenty of celebrities have posed with a smoke on the cover of Rolling Stone: Bruno Mars, Keith Richards, Charlie Sheen, the cast of Mad Men — twice.

But none of these other examples are recent. Each is from the early 2010s. Charli XCX is the first to be photographed smoking or holding a cigarette on the cover of the magazine in over 13 years.

It’s very on-brand for the pop star, whose affinity for smoking is the engine of her indie sleaze aesthetic. It’s dirtbag behaviour, but dirtbag behaviour’s becoming incredibly Julia.

At Charli’s 32nd birthday back in 2024, the Spanish singer Rosalía brought her flowers — a bouquet of black calla lilies anointed with Parliament White cigarettes. Her wedding last summer had Vogue super-slims on a platter.

Dua Lipa had the same for hers in May. According to the Guardian, the hottest wedding trend is serving cigarettes in lieu of deviled eggs.

Et tu, Bieber?

Many sexy people are becoming cigfluencers. Kylie Jenner. Justin Bieber. Hailey Bieber. Beyoncé in Paris, onstage. Ben Affleck in the meme that best defines our collective mood.

Smoking is suddenly everywhere. Sabrina Carpenter uses a fork as a cigarette holder in the video for “Manchild.”

Of course she does.

In 2021, roughly 13 per cent of top Billboard music videos depicted smoking. In 2022, that number doubled.

All of the best TV characters smoke. Ava Daniels from Hacks. Dana Evans from The Pitt. Carmy Berzatto from The Bear — and even Sydney in the Season 4 finale. Of the 50 films up for the Oscar for Best Picture over the last five years, 42 contained tobacco imagery.

Last November, a 75-year-old actor named Bob Terry went viral for a flyer inviting New Yorkers to smoke a cigarette with him in Washington Square Park.

Many, many people took him up on it — some 1,500 strangers, in a smoke break for the ages, proving tobacco use may be associated with more than 40 “debilitating and often fatal diseases,” by Health Canada’s count, but cigarettes can also cause a moment of community.

It’s laughable, but don’t forget that loneliness is still an epidemic, just as bad for people’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day — and that’s according to the U.S. Surgeon General.

If everyone’s smoking in Lower Manhattan and you’re chewing Nicorette all by yourself, like a leper, who’s healthier?

By that calculus, you’d be a fool not to smoke. Buy a lighter en route to the zeitgeist and call it a wellness retreat.

This is the larger issue. Celebrity influence goes a long way, but what’s resuscitating cigarettes and glamorizing smoking most of all is modern life: how much it sucks.

‘Why not smoke? Nothing matters!’

The loneliness of living on our phones creates a yearning for the days of blowing smoke at friends and kisses at our crushes in the alley out behind the Boston Pizza. The dissatisfaction with tech and the cancerous digital era makes vaping seem cringe.

Cigarette smoking? It holds an analog, vintage appeal. It’s your lungs collecting vinyl and helping themselves to the Criterion Closet.

And four more years of Donald Trump means four more years of nihilism, bad news and nostalgia for good politicians, like Barack Obama — famously a secret, shameful smoker.

Every cigarette takes roughly 20 minutes off your life. But is it really any worse for us than 2026? And what, exactly, are we looking forward to?

“The dream of stability, owning a home, financial security feels increasingly out of reach,” Jared Oviatt, the man behind the @Cigfluencers Instagram account, explained to the Guardian on behalf of gen Z.

“So the question becomes: why not do what you want? Why not smoke? Nothing matters!”

The earth is burning and I’m chewing Nicorette

Looking around makes it worse. Big tech, big oil, our governments are all but smoking through us by refusing to address the climate crisis. The world outside my window is a shade of burnt sienna from the smoke of the 109 wildfires currently burning in British Columbia.

The air quality index in the South Okanagan, right now, is akin to smoking half a pack a day — and if you’re lonely, that’s the other half right there.

Every August is like this. It’s normal. We’ve all grown accustomed to losing the sun behind secondhand smoke for the back nine of summer.

So long as our government sits on its hands, building pipelines instead of a breathable future, every slate of anti-smoking graphics — bloody urine, crying baby — seems a little disingenuous to me.

The earth is burning and I’m chewing Nicorette.

It’s enough to turn a hopeless generation into smokers.

We were doing so well. The 2020 Surgeon General's report was a historic moment: smoking in America had fallen to 14 per cent. That was the lowest rate ever recorded, a massive win for public health.

Unfortunately, what followed was a public health disaster: COVID-19, which trapped the whole world in their homes, depressed, desperate for something to do, for a reason to touch grass, and just like that, cigarette sales increased for the first time in decades.

One imagines some of this influence might have been curbed with a different American president.

From the moment he was first elected, Trump crowed about removing regulations. It’s one of the few campaign promises he followed through on.

As the Washington Post reported in an article published last month about smoking’s resurgence, “the Trump administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eliminated the Office of Smoking and Health, funding from which made state tobacco-control programs possible, and withdrew a plan to ban the menthol-flavored cigarettes that are proven to appeal to young users.”

They also actively dismantled public health, and worked feverishly to discredit public health experts like Anthony Fauci.

These are the years when Big Tobacco stands to score

It seems relevant to our discussion that many of the roadblocks preventing both direct and subliminal cigarette advertising seem to have been quietly dismantled by the Trump administration.

Especially in light of a 2018 investigation by Truth Initiative, a non-profit health organization dedicated to preventing youth and adult nicotine addiction, finding that tobacco brands “are using social media in more than 40 countries to promote tobacco use without disclosing that they financed the content.”

Honestly, this might explain how Big Tobacco got so lucky as to score a soft endorsement from seemingly all of the big breakout stars of the past several years.

Both Heated Rivalry idols have been photographed smoking: There’s Connor Storrie for GQ, behind the scenes. There’s Hudson Williams, walking the streets of Milan with a thirst-trapping strut and a lit cigarette, defining aura.

Then there’s Supergirl movie star Milly Alcock out at night, smoking. Swedish singer-songwriter Zara Larsson warmly welcomed into the cigfluencers fold. Even Supriya Ganesh from The Pitt. And Obsession’s Inde Navarette in Cosmospolitan.

Not to mention how a 75-year-old actor dominated social media and seemed to possess enough internet savvy to make flyers that included a working QR code.

This is what QuitNow is up against lately.

Health Canada, too. As the federal government pushes to reduce tobacco use to less than five per cent by 2035, a seemingly feasible goal with the habit in steady decline, the 2025 Canadian Substance Use Survey seems to show a minor setback: an unexpected increase.

Fourteen per cent of the 2025 survey respondents admitted to smoking a cigarette in the last 30 days, up from 13 per cent in 2023.

More concerning, among youth and young adults, 15 per cent said the same, up from 14 per cent two years prior.

It’s not a spike, but it’s an early warning sign. This number’s been on the decline since the 1960s.

But as we wait for fresher, more conclusive, qualitative data, the qualitative evidence is painting a pretty clear picture of where this is headed. Smoking is cool again. Sure, it accounts for 48,000 Canadian deaths every year, but doesn’t everyone deserve a little treat? Should we all start smoking cigarettes again? asked the author Xochitl Gonzalez, in a viral essay published by the Cut.

“With each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows,” wrote Gonzalez, later admitting “I’m no longer certain that the future I’ve been preserving myself for is all that promising.”

Less than a month later, Charli XCX all but echoed Gonzalez in the chorus of her latest single, “SS26”:

Spring/Summer ‘26, when the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it
Yeah, we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell
I know

“Cigarettes: put ‘em out,” she sings sarcastically, to start the second verse.

Or maybe she means on a platter, for guests at your wedding.