The Allure of Smoking Rises Again

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The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out. Despite the fact that cigarette use is at an 80-year-low in America, smoking has, unfortunately, become cool again. At the New York Fashion Week show in February, some models accessorized their runway outfits with a cigarette. A clip of the TikTok influencer Addison Rae smoking two cigarettes is cut into her latest music video, which has more than 4 million views. The pop star Charli XCX, who was recently gifted a bouquet of cigarettes for her birthday, sparked one during her performance in Manchester last month, and has said that her brat starter pack would include “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, and a strappy white top with no bra.”

All of this is despite the fact that anyone born after 1964, when the surgeon general pronounced that smoking causes cancer, should know the habit is just about the worst thing you can do if you want to live a long, healthy life. And many people grasped that much earlier: The Atlantic contributor James Parton wrote back in 1868 that “it does not pay to smoke.” When he quit tobacco, he had fewer headaches, enjoyed exercise more, and held a “better opinion of myself” (though I admit that his prescribed method for kicking the habit—drinking a “good stiff glass of whiskey and water” instead of reaching for a pipe—hasn’t held up very well).

Tobacco has been a staple of American industry and culture since its founding. “AMERICA is especially responsible to the whole world for tobacco, since the two are twin-sisters, born to the globe in a day,” an unnamed Atlantic contributor wrote in 1861, just four years after the magazine’s founding. Cigarettes later became not just ubiquitous but cool, thanks to decades of advertising. Atlantic writers have explored how cigarette companies devised campaigns in the 20th century targeting feminists, Black consumers, and folks who aspired to be something like the real-life Marlboro man. As the writer Judith Ohikuare documented in 2014, this magazine, like many publications, was littered with such ads half a century ago. But in the decades following the surgeon general’s 1964 report, health advocates attempted to counterprogram Americans’ perception of cigarettes. Health classes across the country ensured that smoking them was permanently associated with images of gum decay and blackened, deflated lungs. “Eradicating the glamor of smoking has been one of the successes of health advocates,” Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture, wrote in 2011.

That’s what makes the rise of cigarette chic baffling. I occasionally get Marlboro ads in the mail, and there isn’t a hipster or pop star in sight. The brand doesn’t even have an Instagram account. One explanation is that more people are entering the vape-to-cigarette pipeline, though whether vaping actually leads to smoking is hotly debated. Some of the appeal might also be nostalgic: In recent years Millennials experimented with “indie sleaze,” Gen Z revived the Y2K aesthetic, and Tumblr even had a brief resurgence, as my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2022. Why not cigarettes?

The FDA’s latest tactic to scare people away from smoking is a new rule that forces companies to print disturbing images on their packages showing some of the serious and lesser-known effects of smoking. (The photos include a cup of bloody urine and a woman with a neck tumor so large, she appears to have swallowed a baseball.) The Supreme Court gave regulators the green light to implement the labels last month, despite objections from cigarette companies, who called the photos “massive, provocative, and misleading.” The FDA says the images “promote greater public understanding of the negative health consequences of cigarette smoking,” but there’s undoubtedly some effort to shock both potential and long-time users. “Smokers have, over time, become largely impervious to the neatly printed ‘warning’ on cigarette packages, reading right past them,” the lawyer and journalist Raymond Bonner wrote in 2011, when he reported on Australia’s effort to implement similar labels. “It is hard to imagine ignoring these pictures.”

But the new labels don’t necessarily kill the cool factor of smoking. Trying things that the authorities say you shouldn’t was a cherished pastime of humanity long before cigarettes ever came on the scene. (Forbidden fruit, anyone?) In fact, there’s research suggesting that graphic warning labels could backfire because they cause “psychological reactance,” a boomerang effect that occurs when a perceived loss of freedom prompts users to pursue a behavior they’re told to avoid.

To be clear: I’m not saying bloody urine and cancer are cool. But cool and dangerous are more alike than they are different. Until regulators figure out how to kill the allure of smoking, it’ll be with us ad infinitum. Nothing that engrained in a society goes away without a fight.