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\u201cIt\u2019s elegance. It\u2019s sleaze. It\u2019s gross. It\u2019s natural. It\u2019s also, of course, absolutely terrible for your body in every conceivable way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n
Still, the consequences are real. \u201cSmoking is never in style\u2014we aren\u2019t talking skinny jeans or bell bottoms,\u201d says board-certified dermatologist Mona Gohara, MD. \u201cWe\u2019re talking carcinogens, which are never cute.\u201d And, far short of cancer, yellowed teeth and nails, she says, are just the beginning of the aesthetic consequences; smoking severely impacts skin health and appearance, accelerating collagen and elastin breakdown, deepening wrinkles around the mouth and eyes, dulling skin tone, thinning hair, and restricting blood flow that delivers oxygen and nutrients to skin cells. Briefly set aside during a smoke break, these indisputable truths stand in stark contrast to our collective obsession with the perfectly smooth and \u201csnatched\u201d look, sustained by the proliferation of wrinkle-reducing injectable procedures and facelifts.<\/p>\n
Even as we continue to indulge a harmful habit that makes us, for lack of a better term, uglier, people won\u2019t kick the habit\u2014or at least stop aestheticizing it. Which, I won\u2019t lie, I understand. There\u2019s something about a cigarette in the right kind of ambience that functions as a sort of aesthetic appendage. A rouge-smudged butt or sparking up with both hands is visually evocative, like peering over a mysterious pair of shades or flipping open a compact. Some Gen Xers today look back fondly at the days when they would light up a cigarette when they needed an escape or a distraction to kill dead time\u2014today they light up their iPhones and start doomscrolling.<\/p>\n
But beyond aesthetics, the newfound pervasiveness of cigarettes only makes more sense when you take a step back and look at the bigger cultural picture. In an era where GLP-1 drugs are increasingly framed as a get-skinny-quick scheme\u2014one many find irresistible despite mounting concerns about long-term effects\u2014the return of cigarettes feels less accidental. The hyperfixation around wellness has splintered into a whole spectrum of archetypes\u2014from Pilates princesses to \u201cthat girl\u201d (whoever she is) and everything in between\u2014and cigarettes sit on its the ever-growing fringes. They function as a kind of cultural foil of indulgent destruction, a release of the burden of constantly striving for perfection, or at least keeping up that appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n
“That people would lean into something unabashedly detrimental feels perversely inevitable.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n
On that note, it\u2019s hard to ignore the growing nihilism that our current political climate\u2014and environmental climate, for that matter\u2014is igniting. In 2025, roughly one in four adults under 30 report experiencing depression, a rate that has more than doubled since 2017, according to Gallup. We\u2019re conditioning ourselves to live with the ubiquitous sense of doom, and in the face of global disorder and disarray, a cigarette posits itself as harmless in comparison.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
We\u2019re no longer in an era of ignorant bliss or naive nonchalance around the dangers of cigarettes (which were once widely advertised as being good for our health). Despite a collective understanding of the consequences\u2014smoking kills, after all\u2014it\u2019s not as though anyone ever truly stopped. Even as traditional cigarettes fell out of favor throughout the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8249,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-beauty"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/cigarettes-beauty-products.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}