When I was a child I was led to believe that great diabolical temptation, “smoking”, would present itself to me, serpentine, hanging around a disused bike shed or down a ginnel on the way home from school.
It would probably involve peer pressure, and how I responded to it would determine both the course of my future and my classification as either a good or bad person. It did not seem difficult to do. I had grown up in a world where smoking was bad: bad for your health, done by bad girls, morally bad.
Now we live in a world that where smoking is good. Or bad – but in the cool way. Subversive, carefree, fun, part of an aesthetic of old-school elegance, or hedonism, or both.
Charli xcx, who declared “pack of cigs and a Bic lighter” central to her “brat” era two years ago; globetrotting, hard-partying, well-read Dua Lipa; beautiful Palestine activist Bella Hadid; doe-eyed, introspective Gracie Abrams. The cigarette is no longer only the accessory of choice for “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 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 photos of themselves on nights out in clouds of smoke in fear of their mother’s retribution are now passing round Vogues on silver platters at their weddings, offering monogrammed 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, cyber bullying, AI chatbots telling young people to kill themselves. I don’t see anywhere near enough outrage about the creeping prevalence of cigarettes online.
It doesn’t matter that no one born after 2009 will ever legally buy a packet of cigarettes, that it has been illegal to advertise tobacco products since 2003 or that nobody with a conscience would ever assist the industry’s promotion: they no longer need to. They spent billions lying about the health risks, denying the addiction problems, misleading the public with “light” products and filters that neutralise the threat of smoking in popular and social consciousness. Now Instagram is doing it for them for free.
There are all sorts of reasons posited for why smoking is “back”. Despite fewer smokers overall than ever, there has been an increase for the first time in two decades in certain areas, including the South of England. Perhaps it is an overcorrection to the previous decade’s toxic wellness culture, part of the shift towards “authentic” and “messy” over pristine and perfect (never mind the perfect veneer of most of the women showing off their fags online).
Perhaps it is a display of analogue sophistication in contrast to the ugly immaturity of vapes. Perhaps it is a response to the impossibility of maintaining a healthy lifestyle and buckling under the pressure of keeping a happy gut, taking creatine for our brains, protein-maxxing, weight-lifting for bone density and going sober to avoid mental decay and cancer.
Some people – usually wealthy, attractive and posh – defend smoking as a sort of nihilism, “the world’s burning anyway”, “something’s got to kill us”, which makes me cringe.
Whatever the justification for its uptake, and no matter that smokers will argue that it’s always “looked cool”, social media allows for the dissemination of images that glamourise something dangerous that ought to be taboo. And nobody’s there to stop it. There is even a specific account dedicated to glorifying smoking: “Cigfluencers”, with over 100,000 followers.
It isn’t just alarming – it’s embarrassing. Wielding a fag as an indicator of irony and naughtiness is about as tedious an affectation as bragging that you don’t own a TV. And the desired allure of intrigue is rather undone once you’ve plastered it all over Instagram. Smokers who sneak off shiftily down an alley are actually the responsible ones – unlike the podcasters with millions of listeners who revel in their excitement that “it’s back” or the celebrities who think vapers should “grow up and have a cigarette”, those sneaking smokers at least have some shame.
You’re not supposed to say that now, though, are you? Not supposed to comment on other people’s bodies, to police their choices, to pass judgement, not even supposed to say you don’t like smoking, because it makes you look like a dogmatic child coughing loudly to preach their newly-learnt mantra that “smoking kills”. And sure, every adult has the freedom to do what they want.
But we all know that the images we see online affect our thinking, and the more photos we see of smoking the less malignant, high-risk, and distasteful we perceive it to be. It is peer pressure of a silent kind. It allows us to absorb the impression that everybody is at it, that it is aspirational and even worse, normalised, which has a much more pernicious influence on our behaviour than any traditional advert the tobacco industry might long to produce.
Passivity leads to acceptability – it is what has allowed the image of the sexy smoker to return so aggressively, after decades of public health campaigns. Instagram is much more powerful than the temptress down an alley, and it has allowed Big Tobacco’s dream to come true.
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