Why smoking is back in fashion for Generation Z and a Rishi ban could make it even cooler

After surviving 23 days deprived of food, hot showers and a flushable toilet, at the end of last year Sam Thompson emerged from the I’m a Celebrity jungle desperate for one thing… a drag on a cigarette.

The 31-year-old Made in Chelsea star puffed away at the show’s wrap party and joined a long list of cool kids who love to light up. The Bear star Jeremy Allen White, pop star Rosalía, actor Paul Mescal and TikToker Victoria Paris are just a few of the young famous faces who love to smoke. Griselda, the recent number one show on Netflix, is hardly ever without a cigarette, and while these days they may have to huddle outside to enjoy a ciggie, smoking is making a comeback, particularly among Gen Z.

A new study has revealed that more young people in England took up smoking during the pandemic, stagnating the years-long decline among 18- to 24-year-olds. Before Covid, the number of people smoking overall was falling 5.2 per cent per year, but since 2020, the rate of decrease has slowed to just 0.3 per cent, according to research from University College London (UCL).

Mace Warner, 24, started smoking three years ago, building to his current 10-a-day habit by 2021. “At my retail job smokers get a five-minute fag break every hour, whereas non-smokers don’t get anything, so that’s what got me started,” he recalls.

After experimenting with vaping, Mace, from Lincoln, moved on to Sovereign cigarettes. He said: “I would vape too much as I could just keep going and going with it. In the end, I switched to cigs because I liked that there was an endpoint.”

UCL researchers think that higher levels of stress and social isolation during the pandemic are likely reasons why young people like Mace turned to cigarettes. He agrees that cigarettes help him to chill out, especially at work, saying: “You get time to breathe during an otherwise hectic day. It’s why so many of us smoke at work, and why I started.”

Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster and founder of the Light Years consultancy, also attributes mental health management to the smoking surge. “There’s a layer of mindfulness to smoking. It’s a meditative act and ritualistic. It’s also interesting that as smoking is rising amongst Gen Z they are turning away from alcohol which actually increases anxiety.”

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Lucie also thinks that current nostalgia for Nineties culture and Gen Z making up for time lost in lockdown are playing a part, adding that, “post-pandemic there’s a bit of a hedonist wave and that’s driving interest not just in smoking but in nightclubs and partying generally.”

For Mace though, the biggest plus is that smoking helps him meet people. He said: “I interact with a lot of people while smoking. Asking if you can nick a cig or borrow a lighter has led to me speaking to people I’d otherwise never talk to.”

Mace doesn’t buy that smoking is “cool” but he does think some of his fellow smokers may think it’s taboo. “It’s proven that smoking is deadly,” he says. “I know smoking will kill me,” he says. “But I could also die completely unrelated to smoking tomorrow.” This fatalism is a feature of Gen Z – those aged under 26 – according to Lucie. She said: “They have inherited an absolute dumpster fire, they might not ever be able to buy a house and the planet is burning, so a lot of them think: why not?”

If the government is looking for pointers on how to reverse the rise, the cost of cigarettes is crucial. “I smoke about 10-ish a day on average, spending £45 a week on three packs,” says Mace. “If fags went up to £20 a pack I would cut down.”

Smoking’s decline started in the 1970s, and last year the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that 6.4 million British adults were smokers, the lowest proportion of the population since records started in 2011. The downturn followed a myriad of public health initiatives designed to stub smoking out, including the banning of TV advertisements in 1965, the introduction of high sales taxes in the 1980s and the public places smoking bans in the late 2000s. Since 2012 it’s been illegal to display tobacco products in shops and, in 2017, cigarettes could only be sold in plain packaging.

Before the new research was published, the UK government had already proposed stricter limits on tobacco sales. In the King’s speech last year, the government set out its plan for a “smoke-free generation” by banning the sale of tobacco products altogether. The proposed legislation would see a phasing out of sales resulting in children currently aged 14 or younger unable to buy cigarettes in England at any age.

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The lead author of the aforementioned UCL report, Dr Sarah Jackson, thinks the government is right to focus on smoking prevention, but added that distributing a million e-cigarettes could also reverse the trend. She told BBC News: “Smoking is uniquely lethal, yet most of the concern is about young people vaping. The risks of vaping are substantially lower than the risks of smoking.”

But in Mace’s case, it was vaping that led him to start smoking cigarettes. And other doctors have raised concerns that vaping can be a “gateway” to smoking, especially for young people who have never smoked before. Vaping isn’t harmless if it gets you hooked on something that you weren’t addicted to in the first place. In an article for Johns Hopkins Medicine, Dr Michael Blaha, a professor of medicine, warned that, “we might be causing the next smoking epidemic through young people getting addicted to electronic cigarettes early in life”.

Mum-of-two Jane Edwards shares the concern after watching her teenage son make the leap from vaping to cigarette smoking. She said: “My eldest is 19 and he would chain vape all the time and it quickly escalated to smoking real cigarettes. It’s having the reverse effect that it has on adults trying to give up the real fags.

“I’m worried that my other son, who’s just 16, will follow a similar path. He too is constantly vaping in his room, while he does his homework. At least with smoking they can’t do it inside and who knows what the chemicals are doing to their young lungs?”

Around 4.5 million Brits vape and it’s most popular among 16- to 24-year-olds, according to the ONS. More than 15 per cent of that age group said they were daily or occasional vapers last year, up from 11 per cent just one year earlier.

Similarly, oral nicotine pouches, known as “snus”, have seen a massive spike in popularity. The pouches, which are placed under the top lip for between five to 10 minutes, do not contain tobacco but are packed with nicotine. The small sachets, which originate from Sweden and go by brand names including Nordic Spirit, Velo and ZYN, have recently come under scrutiny after a number of Premier League footballers were seen using them. The Athletic website reported that up to 40 per cent of players could be regular nicotine pouch users, while England and Leicester striker Jamie Vardy admitted using “snus” in his autobiography.

With both cigarette smoking and the use of replacement products – like vapes and “snus” – on the up, years of progress could be lost, leading to major implications for the nation’s health and the NHS. According to Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), smoking is the primary cause of preventable illness and premature death in England, accounting for approximately 74,600 deaths a year.

It’ll be particularly tough to reverse the smoking surge amongst young people if influential celebrities continue to light up, according to Lucie. She says: “A lot of Gen Z celebrities smoke, like Lily-Rose Depp. The character she played in The Idol was smoking constantly.” She added: “For a lot of Gen Z, I don’t think they intend to become a chain smoker or to get completely addicted. It’s more like they are having a cerebral cigarette.” Tell that to Generation X, they probably thought the same.

Rachel Richardson writes the trends newsletter highly flammable on Substack