Cigarettes are all over pop culture again
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Illustration: Maura Kearns/Axios
Cigarettes were once unavoidable in the U.S., in restaurants, airplanes, your mom's living room — until health warnings and cultural pressure put out the hype.
The big picture: Something's shifted. Young people are talking up smoking again, and celebrities are casually lighting up on screen. Experts worry that they're not paying attention to the dangers of addiction.
- Films and TV shows are bringing cigarettes back as props, too, making them en vogue once again.
- More than half of the top box-office films released in 2024 featured tobacco imagery — marking a 10 percentage point jump from the year before, according to a report from public health nonprofit Truth Initiative and NORC at the University of Chicago
You'd be hard-pressed to miss cigarettes across pop culture.
- Dakota Johnson lights up in the dramedy "The Materialists." The chefs on "The Bear" smoke regularly, with season 3 featuring Carmy's efforts to quit.
- Sabrina Carpenter takes a puff a cigarette with a fork in her "Manchild" music video.
- The Instagram account Cigfluencers posts old and new photos of celebs — including Charli xcx, Natalie Portman and Leo DiCaprio — taking drags.
Zoom out: Across social media, smokers and non-smokers have pointed out the abundance of people lighting up, too.
- "I have one cigarette a day," said Chloe Richman, host of the "all body no brains" podcast in an August episode. "I smoke the skinny ones, so it's like barely anything."
- "I truly think smoking a cigarette is one of the coolest things a person can do," said one TikTok user in a video with 33,000 views. "I wish I wasn't such a baby so I could take it up as a full-time habit."
What they're saying: "Every few years, we see headlines claiming that smoking is becoming popular again," Ranjana Caple, director of federal advocacy at the American Lung Association, told Axios.
- "It's not new to make smoking look cool," she added. "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."
Reality check: Cigarettes are still a major public health concern, and fewer people are smoking every year.
- Per the CDC, 16 million Americans live with a smoking-related disease.
- Cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of disease, death and disability nationwide, according to the CDC, with more than 480,000 people dying every year from smoking and secondhand smoke.
Zoom out: The return of cigarettes may not be about that nicotine as much as it is about young people's recent obsession with nostalgia.
- Young people have started using analog bags — which contain physical devices like magazines and crossword puzzles — to pry their eyes away from phones.
- They've also embraced the fashion trends of the Y2K era (mostly without the doomsday fears) and the Ralph Lauren Christmas decor that taps into the romanticism of their childhoods.
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