Did Smoking Cigarettes Become Cool Again?
As I sit watching the pilot episode of Mad Men set in 1960s New York, Don Draper tries his hardest to advertise cigarettes in the midst of the growing public awareness of how smoking inherently harms the body. More than six decades later this becomes a repeated phenomenon but no longer do ad agencies have to push for this necrosis desire amongst modern society, celebrities are doing it for them.
We have witnessed in real time that America has a natural born “death wish”, a generationally recurring one, especially if it’s wrapped up in a bow of micro aesthetics.
In 2022, smoking rates were recorded to have dropped to a historic low while e-cigarettes continued to rise. Records in 1940 showed more than half of American adults were seen to have been smoking cigarettes; that number began to drop in 1960 to 2016, dropping all the way to 11% now in 2023 according to the National Health Interview Survey . But could that all be changing?
While cigarette smoking and its level of coolness in society dropped, the rise of E-cigarettes popularized. In today’s world where holding a puff bar or juul to your lips while taking a selfie or methodically holding your e-cig while getting candid photos for your photo dumps has become the norm, it just doesn’t feel like enough for today’s cool kids. Maybe it’s the exclusivity of it, it was in vogue when less people were doing it but now it seems like everyone and their mothers: and fathers – according to A Focus Group Study with College Students are hooked on the portable cigarettes.
With everyone wanting to be exclusive it of course brings in the inevitability of time travel and not necessarily forward.
A candid paparazzi photo of rising “Wednesday” star Jenna Ortega was recently taken of her in London with a cigarette in hand, this photo created buzz all over social platforms. Many shared ill-will of the actor’s decisions while others stated her age of 20 allowing her to make her own decisions as an adult. This critique on Ortega brought a lot of people to openly speak up on their own thoughts of cigarettes and how it fit their niched aesthetics.
With the world seeing a rise in “skinny” coming back and body inclusivity moving out the way – with question on if it was ever in, but that’s for a different article, we see the rise in ways of how to achieve it. The tale is as old as time, cigarette smoking, as it suppresses your appetite but while it does what seems like external good, it is doing the worst to you internally. Maybe even terrible things externally as well cigarette smoking not only dulls you internally but externally as well with our skin being our largest organ; dehydration, hair thinning and loss, and over all extreme aging is caused by those tiny cancerian sticks.
So, are you choosing to be in with the new popular exclusivity of time traveling to smoke cigarettes again or are you taking matters into your own hands and prioritizing your health.
