Tobacco courts young women with covert marketing: The resurgence of cigarettes among influencers and celebrities

Handsome, laughing, flirting... and smoking. The images of Natalie Portman and Paul Mescal having a cigarette outside a London pub were “the biggest advertisement for cigarettes since Mad Men,” as defined by pop culture journalist Hunter Harris. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but lately tobacco appears in more glamorous contexts than we have recently been used to. Dua Lipa at the Glastonbury festival (after saying she had quit), the Olsen sisters on their work breaks, Bella Hadid at Cannes, the cast of The Bear at the premiere of the series’ third season in Los Angeles, Rosalía on a date with Jeremy Allen White... not a vape in sight among A-list celebrities.

The New York Times ran a story on the subject a couple of years ago, but recently a certain fatalistic hedonism seems to be spreading among younger people, amplified by a sense of nostalgia for less measured and produced times. On Instagram, profiles like @cabmate are multiplying, glorying in photos of Kate Moss partying in the 1990s, or Gwyneth Paltrow smoking a Camel. Others showing beautiful people like Anya Taylor-Joy, Dakota Johnson, Malia Obama, Brad Pitt or Lily Rose Depp with their cigarettes cause flashbacks to the absurd schoolyard dynamics with the ‘cool’ kids meeting up to sneak a smoke.

In certain environments, e-cigarettes are beginning to be shunned in favor of an analog nicotine option, possibly more in tune with a desire to return to a screen-free everyday life. According to some reports, smokers or vapers receive half as many ‘matches’ on dating apps as those who don’t smoke, yet in secret smoke-in corners, such as the one at London’s The Chiltern Firehouse hotel, you can’t swing a cat. In these smokehouses fooling around is the order of the day, swapping looking for “likes” for asking for a light. All this is accompanied by the album Brat, the soundtrack of the summer, full of references to the vice. Its author, Charli XCX, shows Chloë Sevigny smoking in the video for 360 and makes no secret of her preference for Marlboros.

Covert marketing

It is disconcerting, to say the least, to see the emergence of a trend that romanticizes nicotine, especially considering all the information on the effects of this substance that have been widely acknowledged for years. It makes one wonder whether this visibility could be the tip of the iceberg of a return to this habit among young people. Dr. Karen Ramírez, of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (AECC), dispels these doubts: “Since 2006, a negative trend has persisted in the prevalence of tobacco consumption, reaching the lowest levels recorded since 1994.” However, this does not mean that young people are not immune to any type of tobacco promotion on social networks, an influence that can result in addictive behaviors.

According to data from this association provided by Ramírez, it has been proven that if young people see their referents smoking, it generates a normalization of consumption from an early age, in addition to decreasing the perception of risk. A recent report by the AECC notes that 57.2% of young people believe that smoking is fashionable because actors, streamers, or influencers do it. “The Cancer Observatory also points out that young people’s exposure to so-called digital smoke on social networks and video platforms is strongly correlated with consumption. Among people who have had this exposure there are more than twice as many smokers (53.1%) as among those who have not (24.5%),” says Ramírez.

Although it can be seen as a reaction to the imposition of an ultra-capitalist welfare culture, or by an esthetic that is moving away from AI-generated content, we cannot avoid the suspicion that this current is not entirely spontaneous: the extreme regularization of the promotion of tobacco products, and their prohibition in certain spaces, does not prevent them from being endorsed by influencers in marketing campaigns.

Ramírez states that these products are still promoted via other channels: “Up to nine out of 10 boys and girls are exposed to digital smoke through explicit and covert advertising on social media and video-on-demand platforms, which doubles the chances of smoking conventional tobacco,” she says.

Younger smokers

The AECC points out that although the number of smokers has fallen, there has been an increase in the average number of cigarettes smoked per day compared to 2021, with the highest figure for students since 2004. This may indicate that previously healthier habits are beginning to change in some cases. On top of that, smoking is more prevalent among young women, who are more likely to see those posts by Lana del Rey or Dua Lipa. “This situation occurs at all ages,” explains Ramírez. “The biggest difference is among 18-year-old students, where women are ahead by 6.8 percentage points.”

Alicia Fábrega, marketing and advertising director of VEIN and Fucking Young magazines, who regularly collaborates with young actors, artists and influencers, believes that the abundance of information and social networks have given this habit more visibility. “Personally, I haven’t noticed an uptick. Generation Z in general leads a healthier lifestyle and I just think that now the one-off is more visible. That thing of hiding your drink in photos is predominantly done by more mature people; I guess they learned to present themselves publicly in a different way, and because maybe when you get older you no longer want to look like a rascal. Instead, when younger people go out at night, they post galleries on their networks because that’s the way they express themselves, showing all the facets of their life,” she reflects. “It’s like when they have a bad day, and they share it.”

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