We’re no longer in an era of ignorant bliss or naive nonchalance around the dangers of cigarettes (which were once widely advertised as being good for our health). Despite a collective understanding of the consequences—smoking kills, after all—it’s not as though anyone ever truly stopped. Even as traditional cigarettes fell out of favor throughout the past two decades—only 1.4 percent of teenagers today report cigarette use, according to the FDA—nicotine use itself has persisted, shapeshifting into vapes, patches, and ZYN pouches, each with youth-forward aesthetics of their own, if not the same cultural romance. If anything, cigarettes take it a step further; offering a tactile respite that counters the plastic rigidity of vapes.
Still, the consequences are real. “Smoking is never in style—we aren’t talking skinny jeans or bell bottoms,” says board-certified dermatologist Mona Gohara, MD. “We’re talking carcinogens, which are never cute.” And, far short of cancer, yellowed teeth and nails, she says, are just the beginning of the aesthetic consequences; smoking severely impacts skin health and appearance, accelerating collagen and elastin breakdown, deepening wrinkles around the mouth and eyes, dulling skin tone, thinning hair, and restricting blood flow that delivers oxygen and nutrients to skin cells. Briefly set aside during a smoke break, these indisputable truths stand in stark contrast to our collective obsession with the perfectly smooth and “snatched” look, sustained by the proliferation of wrinkle-reducing injectable procedures and facelifts.
Even as we continue to indulge a harmful habit that makes us, for lack of a better term, uglier, people won’t kick the habit—or at least stop aestheticizing it. Which, I won’t lie, I understand. There’s something about a cigarette in the right kind of ambience that functions as a sort of aesthetic appendage. A rouge-smudged butt or sparking up with both hands is visually evocative, like peering over a mysterious pair of shades or flipping open a compact. Some Gen Xers today look back fondly at the days when they would light up a cigarette when they needed an escape or a distraction to kill dead time—today they light up their iPhones and start doomscrolling.
But beyond aesthetics, the newfound pervasiveness of cigarettes only makes more sense when you take a step back and look at the bigger cultural picture. In an era where GLP-1 drugs are increasingly framed as a get-skinny-quick scheme—one many find irresistible despite mounting concerns about long-term effects—the return of cigarettes feels less accidental. The hyperfixation around wellness has splintered into a whole spectrum of archetypes—from Pilates princesses to “that girl” (whoever she is) and everything in between—and cigarettes sit on its the ever-growing fringes. They function as a kind of cultural foil of indulgent destruction, a release of the burden of constantly striving for perfection, or at least keeping up that appearance.
On that note, it’s hard to ignore the growing nihilism that our current political climate—and environmental climate, for that matter—is igniting. In 2025, roughly one in four adults under 30 report experiencing depression, a rate that has more than doubled since 2017, according to Gallup. We’re conditioning ourselves to live with the ubiquitous sense of doom, and in the face of global disorder and disarray, a cigarette posits itself as harmless in comparison.
