After decades of decreasing smoking rates, it seems like everyone is lighting up — and A-listers are leading the way.
You’ve likely sung along to Addison Rae’s recent single “Headphones On” and its standout lyric: “Guess I gotta accept the pain / Need a cigarette to make me feel better.” Or Lorde proclaiming, “This is the best cigarette of my life,” in her anthem “What Was That.”
If pop music isn’t your jam, maybe you noticed Dakota Johnson as chic matchmaker Lucy with a cig in her hand for most of Materialists when it was released in June, or Ayo Edebiri’s Syd on The Bear trying to take up smoking after watching her coworkers light up for the past four seasons.
If none of those feel familiar, just take a look outside your local bar on a Saturday night for proof: On the screen and in the streets, smoking cigarettes is back in fashion.
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Take it from Jared Oviatt, who was inspired to start the Instagram account @cigfluencers (80K followers and rising) in 2021 after Dua Lipa posted a photo of herself lighting up.
“It struck me: Here is this gorgeous, hypervisible pop star openly indulging in something that still felt a bit taboo,” Oviatt told Us. “To me, this pointed to something I always suspected to be true: If you’re hot enough, you can get away with it.”
Since then, his IG has transformed into a “visual, curated” collection of photos — new and old, on set and off — of A-listers from Jenna Ortega and Leonardo DiCaprio to Nicole Kidman and Harrison Ford taking drags.
Not all fans love the fact that nicotine consumption — which had finally loosened its coolness grip on younger generations, thanks to targeted marketing campaigns like the Truth Initiative — is somehow being glorified again.
Nicola Peltz Beckham’s Instagram followers are up in arms anytime the actress shares a selfie with a cig in hand. (“I love you but please don’t promote smoking,” one wrote in May.) And when Gracie Abrams was spotted punching a dart this summer while hanging with boyfriend Paul Mescal, her fan base freaked, citing lyrics from the singer’s 2021 song “Camden”: “At least I’ll never turn to cigarettes / My brother shielded me from all of that / He said that smoking was a killer.”
And it is. Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, with tobacco use linked to cancer, heart disease and other health risks. While public health campaigns effectively reversed the epidemic — smoking rates decreased more than 85 percent among young people from 1997 to 2022, according to the American Lung Association — recent years have seen a resurgence of the trend. In fact, in 2020, for the first time in two decades, cigarette sales increased, the Federal Trade Commission reported.
“Cigarette smoking’s return among Gen Z is partly a rebellion against the sanitized, tech-saturated, wellness-obsessed culture they’ve grown up in,” psychotherapist and author Jonathan Alpert told Us. “Vaping became mainstream and corporate: sleek, fruity and medicalized. Smoking, by contrast, feels raw, retro and rebellious. … In a world that’s constantly curated, cigarettes suggest something messy and real.”
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(That Oviatt used the word “curated” to describe his collection of photos of people smoking — and Alpert considers smoking a byproduct of an overly curated world — is a contradiction we don’t have time to unpack.)
Alpert adds that the “romantic grittiness” of smoking aligns with the larger resurgence of ’90s aesthetic nostalgia, with young people in particular looking to cultural figures to shape their identity. There’s a danger to romanticizing something harmful, he says: “When persona includes addiction, the consequences are real.”
Oviatt sees it differently.
“There’s a quiet nihilism settling in among younger generations,” he says. “Graduate, get a job, buy a house — that doesn’t really hold up anymore. So why keep playing by the rules?”
For those who aren’t amused or delighted by pictures of beautiful people lighting up, Oviatt simply says look away: “You don’t have to be cigfluenced.”
