To get the obvious out of the way, smoking is bad for you.
If you are like me, born in the 2000s and raised in the 2010s, then you never experienced any great controversy over the detrimental health effects of smoking. They’ve been known for decades, beaten into our heads repeatedly through graphic PSAs, school health classes and the glaring Surgeon General’s warning on each smoker’s first pack of cigarettes. But no matter how many government health campaigns are run or public space smoke bans enacted, freedom demands that every New Yorker retain the right to participate in what remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
Thus, I have no interest in talking about smoking’s health effects or making a paternalistic plea to others to make better choices. We all know that smoking is bad for you, and I am hardly in any position to tell others how to live their lives. What really interests me is the enduring aesthetic of smoking and the widespread sentiment that smoking, regardless of its health effects, is undeniably cool.
The willingness of stars like Dua Lipa and Jeremy Allen White to smoke in public is only a continuation of a styled aesthetic that has existed in pop culture for over a century.
To see the glamourization of smoking in action, look no further than the Cigfluencers Instagram page, a repository for candids, magazine shots and film stills of celebrities lighting up. After only a few seconds of scrolling, it becomes apparent just how versatile the smoking aesthetic is. A cigarette on the lips or between two fingers can confer an image of seriousness, rebellion, sophistication or playfulness. The cigarette can either be enjoyed alone in stoic calm or bring people together as a leisurely social activity. In real life, you may associate smoking with the smell of death or yellow nails and teeth. But in these images, where the lighting always happens to be forgiving, smoking is fun, sexy and cool.
To be fair, the perceived “coolness” of smoking is hardly a recent phenomenon. Be they classic Hollywood stars like James Dean or Audrey Hepburn, or rock stars like Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain, the cigarette has always been a visual shorthand for desired images of elegance or depth. The willingness of stars like Dua Lipa and Jeremy Allen White to smoke in public is only a continuation of a styled aesthetic that has existed in pop culture for over a century.
But what does it really mean for something to be “cool”? After all, coolness is famously mutable; what one generation considers cool is often decried as “uncool” by the next generation. This makes it all the more interesting that the smoking aesthetic has persisted in pop culture for so long. It was glamourized by the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in the 1950s before becoming a symbol of rebellion in the rock and punk scenes of the 1970s. By the 1990s, when the dangers of smoking had become widely known to the public, the cigarette was embraced as part of the “messy” aesthetic embodied by the grunge movement and heroin chic style. While millennials popularized a shift away from cigarette smoking and towards vaping, the cigarette continues to be a much more powerful symbol in the public’s imagination. Its image has been cultivated and appropriated for decades, becoming a marker for both idealized masculine and feminine images.
At the same time, countercultural cigarette use and the ubiquitous understanding of smoking’s dangers have allowed the cigarette to become a symbol of rebellion and non-conformity.
Social desirability is a central aspect of “coolness.” The cigarette’s association with both “cachet” and “contrarian” attributes may best explain the enduring allure of the smoking aesthetic. Years of mainstream and celebrity cigarette use have led to smoking’s association with a certain kind of maturity or discernment. At the same time, countercultural cigarette use and the ubiquitous understanding of smoking’s dangers have allowed the cigarette to become a symbol of rebellion and non-conformity. Cigarette smoking rates may be at historic lows, but this decline could be the very reason why the smoking aesthetic has seen a comeback. It embodies both a nostalgic return to a long-romanticized image and a contemporary reaction to the excesses of an increasingly prevalent and toxic “wellness” culture.
I was once receptive to the romanticized image of cigarette smoking. I knew that it was bad to smoke ever since the cartoons of my childhood were interrupted by images of jawless women and men with holes in their throats. But even then, I still found it difficult to deny that there’s something strangely captivating about it. It’s at least much cooler-looking than puffing a mango-flavored USB drive (whatever happened to the lollipop?). But in the same way that explaining a joke kills it, learning about how the smoking aesthetic came into being made me realize that I had been duped by one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in the history of American capitalism.
Prior to World War I, the most popular use of tobacco in the United States was chewing tobacco. The cigarette, which had only begun mass production in the 1880s, became popular among American soldiers during the war due to its ease of use and transportation. Cigarette companies capitalized on this newfound popularity by adorning their advertisements with American flags and images of servicemen. When soldiers began to return from the war, they brought their smoking habits with them, and the cigarette began its longstanding association with patriotism and masculinity.
Expanding cigarette use to women would require a more targeted campaign. While cigarette smoking rose among men, female smoking was considered taboo and a threat to public morality. To change this perception, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays to promote its Lucky Strikes brand of cigarettes to women. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, employed a multitude of tactics to get women to embrace smoking. Given nicotine’s suppressing effect on appetite, Lucky Strikes were marketed as a form of weight control, and advertisements promoted the thin ideal. When women chose not to buy Lucky Strikes because its green packaging did not match their clothes, Bernays organized “The Green Ball” to generate positive coverage of debutantes wearing green in an effort to make the color seem more fashionable. Perhaps Bernays’ most infamous creation was the “Torches of Freedom” campaign, which presented smoking as an emancipatory act that liberated women from a prejudicial sex taboo. During the 1960s, the tobacco industry continued to tie the cigarette to women’s liberation, even while using imagery that reflected a male-driven view of desired femininity.
Decades of advertising, product placement in film and movies, and celebrity usage allowed the tobacco industry to successfully manufacture the smoking aesthetic. The 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement between America’s four largest tobacco companies and 46 states almost completely curtailed cigarette advertising in the United States. All outdoor advertising for cigarettes was banned, and the tobacco industry was forced to give up all their famous trademark characters, such as Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man. But by the time the agreement was reached, the smoking aesthetic had been irreversibly ingrained into the minds of several generations of Americans. It is now promoted to a new generation for free by accounts such as Cigfluencers or whenever the cigarette is used to reflect a time or convey a mood in a piece of media. Rather than being a form of authentic expression, the smoking aesthetic is a deliberately manufactured image created by and for the benefit of the tobacco industry.
Addiction is the business model, and the smoking aesthetic has always existed for the purpose of onboarding new addicts.
Due to the fact that smoking rates are down and cigarette advertising is practically nonexistent, it may seem anachronistic to treat the tobacco industry as a modern threat. But the tobacco industry continues to be immensely powerful and incredibly profitable. Buying and smoking a cigarette is no more rebellious than buying a Che Guevara shirt from a fast fashion retailer.
I did not want to dwell on smoking’s health effects, but once the smoking aesthetic is revealed to be a manufactured image, it becomes impossible to separate it from the tobacco industry’s reliance on addiction. The tobacco industry survives by creating a problem and offering the easiest solution to address it. They have and continue to target children and young adults because these demographics are most likely to develop a lifelong nicotine addiction. Nearly ninety percent of adult daily smokers started smoking by the age of 18, and only ten percent of adults who attempt to quit smoking actually succeed. Addiction is the business model, and the smoking aesthetic has always existed for the purpose of onboarding new addicts, most of whom start young and are likely to fork over thousands of dollars to the tobacco industry for the rest of their lives. Even when you try to quit cigarettes, the tobacco industry has successfully invested in alternative nicotine products such as e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches.
Even when putting health effects to the side, the coolness of smoking easily dissipates once it is seen as aligning with an incredibly powerful and predatory industry. The billions of dollars extracted from an addicted consumer base end up in lobbying efforts to weaken public health regulations, environmentally destructive tobacco farming and cultivation operations that utilize child labor. One could argue that there’s no ethical consumption under the current system of global capitalism, and thus, buying cigarettes is no different from buying a phone or a piece of clothing. But the key difference is that there is absolutely no need to smoke or to start smoking. Romanticizing smoking or doing so to match an aesthetic only serves to benefit an industry that represents the very worst aspects of modern capitalism. And there’s nothing cool about that.
