Smoking is cool again but still very deadly.

1 hour ago7 min read

Cigarettes were once unavoidable in the U. S., permeating restaurants, airplanes, and even your mom's living room, until health warnings and cultural pressures extinguished the glamour. But darling, something has shifted dramatically.Young people are now talking up smoking with renewed vigor, and A-list celebrities are casually lighting up on screen as if they're channeling Old Hollywood mystique. Experts are rightly worried that this new generation isn't paying attention to the well-documented dangers of addiction, seduced instead by the aesthetic.The silver screen is once again clouded with smoke, with films and TV shows enthusiastically bringing cigarettes back as essential props. More than half of the top box-office films released in 2024 featured tobacco imagery—a stunning 10 percentage point jump from the year before, according to a report from the public health nonprofit Truth Initiative and NORC at the University of Chicago.You'd be hard-pressed to miss this trend across pop culture; Dakota Johnson lights up with melancholic grace in the dramedy 'The Materialists,' the intensely passionate chefs on 'The Bear' smoke regularly, with season 3 focusing on Carmy's fraught efforts to quit, and pop princess Sabrina Carpenter takes an impossibly chic puff from a cigarette with a fork in her 'Manchild' music video, a move that instantly went viral. The Instagram account Cigfluencers curates a glamorous feed of old and new photos of celebs like Charli xcx, Natalie Portman, and the perennial smoker Leo DiCaprio taking elegant drags, framing each act as a moment of cinematic cool.Across TikTok and other social media platforms, both smokers and non-smokers have pointed out the sheer abundance of people lighting up. 'I have one cigarette a day,' confessed Chloe Richman, host of the 'all body no brains' podcast in a recent August episode, 'I smoke the skinny ones, so it's like barely anything.' Another TikTok user declared with unsettling nonchalance, 'I truly think smoking a cigarette is one of the coolest things a person can do. I wish I wasn't such a baby so I could take it up as a full-time habit.' This sentiment echoes a dangerous nostalgia. Ranjana Caple, director of federal advocacy at the American Lung Association, provided a sobering reality check, telling Axios, 'Every few years, we see headlines claiming that smoking is becoming popular again.It's not new to make smoking look cool. Big Tobacco spent decades perfecting that playbook.Today's moment is a modern remix of an old strategy, and it hides the reality that cigarettes are designed to addict and kill. ' The grim statistics underscore her warning; cigarettes remain a major public health concern, and while fewer people are smoking every year, the CDC reports that 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease.Cigarette smoking is the nation's leading preventable cause of disease, death, and disability, claiming more than 480,000 lives annually from smoking and secondhand smoke. This cultural resurgence may be less about the nicotine itself and more intertwined with young people's recent obsession with analog nostalgia, a trend seen in their embrace of analog bags filled with physical distractions to pry their eyes from phones, the revival of Y2K fashion, and the romanticized Ralph Lauren Christmas decor that taps directly into the comforting romanticism of their childhoods. It's a carefully curated throwback, but one with lethally real consequences hiding behind the stylish haze.

#smoking

#cigarettes

#pop culture

#health risks

#nostalgia

#celebrities

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