Imagine an e-cigarette that came with a cute virtual pet that you could only keep alive by perpetually vaping. It sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. But it isn’t: it’s a real product that was born into the world this spring. Two New York-based software engineers initially planned to create a device that helped you stop vaping – if you vape, your pet dies. But darkness got the better of them. They pursued the pro-vaping route instead. Then the internet found out about the “vape-o-gotchi” – and people lost their minds. “I WILL DIE BEFORE I LET MY TAMAGOTCHI DIE,” one user gushed on X.
The original device may have been something of a joke, but eerily similar ones are now proliferating with no irony attached. There is boom market for candy-coloured, dopamine-dripping nicotine products. And, worryingly, this kawaii vape industry seems to be deliberately appealing to children.
New York City, when I visited recently, felt like a portal into the future. On Saturday night, I was in the smoking area of Basement, a techno club in Queens. A party friend opened her handbag and got out another handbag – only it wasn’t a handbag, it was a compact, pastel-pink, bag-shaped vape. The cutesy accessory had been popping up in New York fashion week events. It was showing up among the doe-eyed Labubus and iced matchas and, as I would later learn, the gobstopper-coloured vapes with touch screens, flashing animations and “puff count competition games”. Across the pond, it seemed, people were sucking on all sorts of garishly gameified devices.
Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about smart vapes, following the emergence of vapes with built-in virtual pets, slot machines, phone functions and social media apps. While such devices haven’t yet infiltrated my social circles in London, they’re not far off. In the UK, smart vapes can be purchased online in a few clicks, with no ID verification and little oversight. And following recent reports that children in the UK as young as 13 are buying illicit vape liquid laced with spice on Snapchat, and the fact that nearly one in ten school children regularly vape, gamified vapes with twinkling screens and retro games like Pac-Man, Tetris and Super Mario feels like a health crisis waiting to happen. What does the next generation of smart vapes tell us about the health of society and our dopamine-addicted, brain-rotting selves? And how do we stop children getting hold of them?
From the very beginning, the vape industry’s marketing has teetered unnervingly teenaged. E-cigarettes were initially marketed as a healthier alternative to smoking tobacco but quickly gained popularity among people who had never smoked. In 2022, Juul agreed to pay close to $440m to settle a two-year investigation launched by 33 states into its nicotine products, revealing that the e-cigarette giant had marketed its products to teens at launch parties, with product giveaways and social media posts of young-looking models. It also advertised on child-focused sites such as dailydressupgames.com and socialstudiesforkids.com. Hundreds of personal suits were brought on behalf of teenagers who say that they became addicted to Juul’s nicotine products, with some accusing the e-cigarettes of causing severe injuries including lung damage and stroke.
Vapes don’t produce carbon monoxide or tar, two of the most harmful ingredients in tobacco smoke, but they do contain nicotine, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease – and gets you hooked. One 20mg/ml vape contains 40mg of the addictive substance, the equivalent of one or two packs of cigarettes. Experts also caution that it may be even easier to get addicted to vaping, because of the relative frictionless of the activity. You don’t need to roll, you don’t need to look at photos of tumour-riddled lungs, you don’t smell of smoke afterwards. You don’t even have to go outside.
The mindlessness of vaping is exactly what makes the activity so appealing – and so dangerous. I bought my first vape in 2022 when I was living in New York City studying journalism, which required me to spend a copious amount of time in my shoebox apartment room trying (and failing) to write. Angsty, restless and distracted, I would always be doing one of three things with my hands: drinking a stupidly expensive soda, refreshing Instagram or inhaling puffs of fruity vapour. Neither of these activities were particularly satisfying, but like eating salt and vinegar Pringles, they provide a sharp flash of pleasure, a sweet pang of dopamine – never enough to be fulfilling but just enough to keep you wanting more.
It does not surprise me that Gen Z, who have been dubbed “generation clean” due to their propensity for gym workouts and sober hangouts, are at the same time: more anxious than ever, increasingly taking up vaping and addicted to their phones. Gen Z spends more time online than any other generation, averaging around six hours per day, according to Ofcom’s annual report, and vaping, like doomscrolling, is both a symptom and a cause of our inability to sit with anxiety, boredom and discomfort. As Jia Tolentino put it in the New Yorker in 2018, “Juuling and scrolling through Instagram offer strikingly similar forms of contemporary pleasure. Both provide stimulus when you’re tired and fidgety, and both tend to become mindless tics that fit neatly into rapidly diminishing amounts of free time.” Stuck in a cycle of feeling anxious and vaping and scrolling, the more we feel unsatisfied, the more we vape and scroll, the more the tech giants profit.
Let us not forget that cigarettes were once marketed as healthy. While we are always going to do things that are bad for us – I don’t think we should be subdued by watermelon flavours and flashing lights into thinking that nicotine-firing devices for teens are anything but a terrible idea. We need proper regulation to stop these dopamine-dinging devices from becoming ubiquitous in the UK.
[Further reading: D4vd and the parasitic cruelty of internet sleuths]Content from our partners
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