Is smoking part of European culture?

[Gallop]

I spend 10 € a day on tobacco, but I'm thinking of quitting, it's a mistake to have dangerous friendships.

[♥ Lily ♥]

We tend to vape on e-liquids in the UK instead of smoking tobacco.

I've seen people from all ages (older people as well as younger people,) all social classes (people in smart business suits seen having a discreet vape outside of their offices, as well as people just casually walking their dogs in the park, and also grannies sitting on park benches using vape pens,) and both males and females vaping in the UK as a safer alternative to smoking.

Most vapers are ex smokers who use small and elegant e-cigarettes ('cig-a-likes',) vaping pens, or simple and small box mod kits that don't have very high temperatures and doesn't create huge clouds of steam.

Personally, I like JAC Vapour and V2 e-liquids as they're both reputable UK brands that adhere to high standards, fast postal and shipping deliveries, great customer service, helpful online support, and they always provide refunds if there's a (rare) problem with orders.

And unlike the vast majority of e-liquid companies that have a lot of wild names for their flavours, JAC and V2 have nice simple names for the flavours on their e-liquid bottles - so you know exactly what flavours you're buying, such as 'toffee', 'vanilla', 'menthol,' 'spearmint,' 'lemon', 'tobacco', 'fresh apple', 'caramel', 'pineapple', 'coconut,' etc.

My favourite flavours are toffee, strawberry, and I especially love Bryn's Té e-liquid which is like an earl grey or lady grey tea flavour with soft citrus notes. I prefer cool vapes with light and small clouds of no more than 18 watts, but I tend to use 12.5 watts of power due to the atomiser's wattage range - otherwise it would damage and burn the coil out, and there's nothing worse when vaping than a dry hit.

JAC Vapour also supplies syringes and DIY picNIC mixing supply kits from a selection of nicotine levels, base liquids, and flavour choices to customise and mix together at home, so I make my own 50ml bottles of e-liquid from the supplies as they can't legally sell 50ml bottles, and it saves money rather than buying lots of 10ml sized bottles.

A 50ml bottle of e-liquid (£13-£14) along with a box of 5 atomisers (£6-£10) will last me for about a fortnight, and the rechargeable vaping batteries tend to last for over a year. A packet of 20 traditional 'analogue' cigarettes costs an average of £10 in the UK, which wouldn't last a week.

There's also disposable vapes which requires no e-liquids or charging... you just remove the hygiene seal and vape. You get about 200-300 inhalations before it stops working and is disposed. You can't refill them, so it's not cheap to vape with disposables.












But there's also a culture amongst vapers called 'cloud chasers', who tend to nearly all be young males who often wear back-to-front baseball caps. There's some young females amongst them too - usually with bright hair dyes and nail varnish to match.

They frequently talk in a highly technological lingo.

They like to make their own vaping coils using vaping tool kits, and they often upload a lot of videos on You Tube where they talk about their latest expensive and very powerful vaping gadgets that have extremely high temperature ranges, bright colours, voice controls, flashing lights, etc, (which I think is very gimmicky.)

They usually have a ton of vaping devices filling the shelves of the rooms in the background of their homes.... and vaping is like a hobby or a sport to them. They also like vaping community fora.

They like to enter cloud chaser competitions where they compete with other cloud chasers to create huge amounts of steam (like a steam train) to win money prizes, and they do lots of vaping tricks by using very powerful devices with extremely low resistance coils that they tweak a lot, and use 100% VG liquids to create maximum steam, (which doesn't look healthy to do.)

An example of the powerful types of box mods that advanced vapers and cloud chasers use are 'Hammer of God DNA 400C MOD' which will fire up to temperatures of 400 celsius. https://www.rhythmnvape.com/products...41011978404027

They tend to refer to e-liquids as 'juice' (which I find a bit irritating,) and they tend to like e-liquids with cartoon style pictures on the bottles, along with crazy brand names and flavour names on the bottles, such as 'vampire juice', 'blood juice', 'banana butt', 'beard vape,' 'suicide bunny', 'lick juice', 'rope cut', 'nasty juice', 'killa fruits', 'milkman' 'mother's milk', 'evil drip', 'riot squad', etc, and they tend to call the mouth pieces on their tanks as 'drip tips.'

Examples of the types of e-liquids ('juices') they find 'cool' in the links below.

https://www.e-liquids.uk/eliquid

https://www.e-liquids.uk/eliquid/suicide-bunny

https://www.electrictobacconist.co.uk/vampire-vape-m57

Here's a long list of words in a vaping glossary that are commonly used by vapers: https://vapinghardware.com/vaping-gl...-vaping-terms/

I get the impression that they aren't ex smokers who simply wanted to stop smoking, but rather people who started vaping in order to look cool amongst their peers.

'Cloud chasers' competing for money prizes:

[BeSustainable5903]

Slightly OT but I have never seen as many smokers anywhere in Europe as I saw in Turkey. Its incredible how many people smoke there. Men, women, young, old.. everyone smokes. Almost every cafe has smoking areas. No one objects to it either.

Other countries in Europe where i have been to and have seen a proportionally higher no of smokers are Italy, Spain and Bulgaria.

In the UK, vaping has become very popular, at least based on what i saw when I was there in September last year.