Future Vape

So how do you smoke a  vape ? That’s an interesting question, and one that a lot of people are asking these days. A few years ago “vapes” – personal vaporisers, or more commonly, electronic cigarettes – were rare, and most people had never heard of them. Now “vape” is in the Oxford English Dictionary and it’s a common topic in newspapers, online discussions and even on TV. But how  do  you smoke a vape? Or is that the wrong question? It’s called Vaping for a reason… Vaping is a replacement for smoking, and a modern device can put out an impressive cloud, but it’s  not  smoke. Smoke is what you get when you burn something, and in an e-cigarette nothing is burning. Instead, what’s happening is that the liquid is being evaporated and turned into a cloud of tiny droplets; that’s what gets inhaled. Although it’s common to talk about “smoking” e-cigarettes, people who actually use them don’t like that word. It’s inaccurate, and of course most vapers ...

That’s a question that many people seem to be confused about. From well-meaning vapers who say “It’s just water vapour” (it isn’t) to tobacco control fanatics yelling, “We don’t know what’s in it” (we do), misinformation and weird beliefs about  e-liquid  are all over the place. Luckily, there’s no real mystery about how e-juice is made or what goes into it. In fact the ingredients are usually all listed on the label. That’s the law in the EU and soon will be in the USA, but reputable juice makers have been doing it for years anyway. So it’s easy to find out what’s in your e-juice, but is that really very informative? Most of it is chemical names, which can look intimidating – and they also don’t say a lot about what the substances actually  are . That makes it easy for people to create scare stories, such as “E-liquid contains antifreeze” (it doesn’t!) Most e-liquid has four main ingredients; there’s some variation, but not really very much. If you know...