"And for an only-would-be-famous person — that is, a civilian who is active on social media — cigarettes are a playful, blasé-bad-girl prop."

"A scroll through TikTok and Reels will show plenty of seductive supercuts of smoking scenes in movies and on TV; cult-popular Instagram accounts like @Cigfluencers ('your favourite smoker’s favourite smokers') give fans a place to leave impassioned comments like 'MADE ME WANT A CIG SO BAD' (re: Ava’s Parisian cigarette in the Hacks finale) with only the occasional scold ('Wow, a page dedicated to people who will die early of lung cancer').... Ironically, the efficacy of turn-of-the-century laws banning cigarettes from public spaces... combined with early-aughts anti-smoking campaigns... which worked to keep millennials from being as cigarette-crazed as older generations, have, by the harsh light of 2026, given cigarette smoking the rosy glow of a bad habit from the good old days...."

From "Cigarettes are back in vogue. How did this happen? Celebrities like Dua Lipa and Gracie Abrams have been photographed with cigs, as have social media influencers who like the retro vibes" (WaPo).

"After a near-oppressive 'wellness' wave, which peaked pre-pandemic — and feels very Obama-era, despite Barack being one of our nation’s most high-profile, semi-closeted smokers — a backlash was perhaps inevitable. As the self-described clean girls ditched their polished aesthetic for Brat summer and an indie sleaze revival, so too did young Pilates devotees and green-juice chuggers start to crack, yearning, perhaps, for what Gwyneth Paltrow once infamously described as 'the balance between cigarettes and tofu.'..."