Shrouded in Watermelon-Mint Smoke: Why So Many Women Are Vaping in Secret
I was 32 and miserable when I got addicted to vaping. It was the winter of 2021, and I was unemployed and living with my parents in Las Vegas, where I knew no one. As my temporary pandemic living situation dragged on, my mood grew darker and more desperate. I bought a nicotine vape at a local smoke shop to take the edge off, as a treat.
My vaping habit was my way of trying to hold off an emotional tsunami with a boogie board. But I kept buying $12 electronic tubes of watermelon mint-flavored nicotine to suck down in the solitude of my bedroom, away from my parents’ prying eyes and aging lungs. Sometimes they’d knock on my door and I’d yell “One second!” while flapping my hands in the air, waving away any visible smoke (though the sticky sweet smell lingered in the air). I felt ashamed; I was a millennial who had developed a habit that felt markedly teenage. And it had me in a chokehold.
As cigarette use has plummeted over the past several decades, vaping—with its enticing scent and aura of being “healthier” (courtesy of some wishful thinking)—has surged in popularity in recent years. Vaping is often associated with the very young: in 2021, a national survey found that 11 percent of U.S. high school students and 3 percent of middle schoolers reported vaping in the last month. But it’s actually young adults who are propelling the explosive rise of vaping: a recent Gallup survey found that nearly a fifth of 18- to 29-year-olds reported vaping, the highest of all the age groups. Problematic drinking as a way to self-soothe may have gotten all the attention during the pandemic, but if you look around, you might notice that it's the adults who are leaving peach-mango-scented clouds in their wake—and brushing off real health concerns.
I’m far from the only grown woman who turned to vaping as a pandemic coping mechanism, then hid it from others. Jasmine Ledesma, 23, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, picked up vaping in 2020 after she had been cigarette-free for two years.
“Everyone was bored,” Ledesma says. “Everything was kind of bleak. Everyone kind of needed an outlet.” It was an especially trying time for Ledesma, whose sister had passed away the year before. She was writing a novella fictionalizing her sister’s life, going through her sister’s old journals and reading about her addiction issues, when her own addiction to vaping first blossomed.
At first, she liked the way vaping made her feel, and how it got her past writer’s block. “I felt like a proper poet,” she says. But soon she was vaping constantly, even going so far as to sneak vape hits inside of the preschool where she worked. Ledesma didn’t think it was possible to become addicted to vaping. “But the first time I tried to quit, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like I'm in hell,’” she says.
I like to keep secrets
For the uninitiated, vapes, or e-cigarettes, work by electronically heating a liquid solution (usually containing nicotine and other substances lending flavor and moisture) into vapor; vapers then breathe this in, delivering nicotine through the lungs directly to the bloodstream. Your body then releases adrenaline, which increases blood pressure and heart rate—and a rush of good feelings.
Ledesma experienced intense withdrawal symptoms when she tried to quit, including depression and sensitivity to light. That’s because nicotine is highly addictive, and vapes can give the user a higher concentration than cigarettes, clearing the path to a fiendishly difficult-to-break habit. One Juul pod contains the same amount of nicotine as about 20 cigarettes, or a pack—and seasoned vapers can puff through a pod in a day or two.
Ledesma now tells her coworkers at her retail job that she’s heading to the bathroom whenever she needs a smoke break. Her parents and most of her close friends don’t know about her vaping, either.
“I like to keep secrets,” she says. “I think it’s fun.” But she’s also worried about seeming immature.
“Older people are smoking cigarettes and younger people are vaping—like, really young people,” she says. “Whenever I go to the smoke shop, it's basically 14-year-olds.”
Davida M., 27, of Chicago, Illinois (who asked that I use only her first name for privacy), feels too old to be vaping in some ways, too. She started when she was 19 as a way to wean off cigarettes. (Research has shown that vaping doesn’t have a significant correlation with quitting cigarettes.) Eight years later, she uses a box mod vape and dislikes Juuls, which she associates with a younger crowd.
“I'm a little bit older than a lot of the people who are Juuling now,” Davida says, “and for me it feels kind of like I would look like I was trying to be younger than I am.”
Davida usually smokes her brother’s homemade “juice” so she knows “pretty much exactly what's going in it,” she says. “That's one of the biggest concerns with smoking, is all the nonsense that goes in there.” Still, she’s confident that vaping is better than smoking cigarettes.
“I feel like it's still not the best for you,” she says. “But I mean, the same can be said for drinking alcohol, or drinking Coca-Cola.”
In reality, though e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco or some other carcinogens like tar found in traditional cigarettes, they can still be harmful and even deadly. Recent studies have linked vaping to increased risk of asthma and other pulmonary diseases. And nicotine itself can harm our cardiac systems. There are still few studies on the long-term health effects of vaping, so doctors are wary to give it the green light, even as an alternative to smoking.
Melting plastic and pouring it into your brain
Many of the women who vape, including me, are well aware of the health risks as they inhale. Vaping ingredients aren’t firmly regulated, and a 2021 study found both caffeine and pesticides in tested vaping liquids and aerosols, including Juuls. But sometimes facing the world head-on seems like an impossible alternative.
Ashley N., a 35-year-old pharmacist in Ohio, started vaping a mix of THC and CBD to escape the postpartum anxiety and depression she experienced after the birth of her third child—her second born during the pandemic. After self-medicating with alcohol following kid number two, she stopped drinking in June 2021. She hadn’t smoked weed since college, but she felt she needed something to help dull the intense pressure of pandemic motherhood.
“I needed to find something that was going to help me self-regulate, because I was fearful that I was going to ruin my family with my outbursts, with my anxious tendencies, with my attitude,” Ashley says. “And so I'm like, well, it's either this, or I destroy my kid’s childhood and my family.”
It’s no secret that parents, and specifically mothers, have felt abandoned by the government and social institutions in the wake of Covid—so it should be no surprise that overstretched moms (who are now grappling with the endless wave of illnesses that accompany a tripledemic) will grasp on to any last-ditch survival tool they can. When Ashley has a rough day, she’ll retreat from her family, take a hit, then return calm and collected for the evening. Her husband knows she smokes, but she still feels bad about it.
“I feel shame because I should be able to ‘handle it all,’” Ashley says. “As a mother I should be able to take care of everybody, show up for everybody, not have any needs and make everybody happy at home, and also do my job well. So the fact that I'm failing there makes me feel shameful. That's why I smoke in the bathroom, because I’m squirreling away my habit.”
It’s perhaps not shocking that many of the women I spoke with for this story used vaping, despite its own perils, as an off-ramp from other addictive substances and destructive coping mechanisms. Claire, a 42-year-old writer in Evanston, Illinois, also gave up drinking two years ago in the midst of the pandemic. But she continued to periodically vape THC, even though she’s well aware of the hazards.
“You're probably just, like, melting plastic and then basically pouring it into your brain,” she says. Still, she bought a “chic and discreet” disposable Beboe pen that’s rose gold and costs $70. It’s easy to take to concerts for some recreational fun (though the moms in her circle generally prefer THC gummies), or to take a quick hit off of upstairs before doing housework or a creative project.
“I've always had a very ambivalent relationship with my pot use,” Claire says. “I'm not proud of it, but I haven't cut it out yet. But I did stop drinking. And so part of it is like, well, I took care of that and I'm gonna need a little while.”
Nobody looks cool vaping
I finally kicked my vaping habit through six months of sobriety at the start of 2022. My cravings eventually subsided enough for me to stop having a visceral physical response when I saw any colored cylinder that vaguely resembled a vape. (I was enamored with a lot of Chapsticks and markers for a while there.) But, if I’m being honest, I still dabble. And If I’m being really honest, I opened a brand new vape immediately after I did an interview for this story where I learned that smoking can make your teeth fall out.
It’s understandable that of all people, it was adults—with their responsibilities and world-weariness—who needed a little something extra to get through the ups and downs of life, especially during these unprecedented years. Some use vaping as a coping tool; others use it as a form of harm reduction. Meanwhile, many of us find that vaping is one of the hardest things to give up for good—even if our cognitive dissonance keeps our habit in hiding.
“If I know someone doesn't approve of smoking, I won't vape around them,” Davida says. “As far as feeling ashamed, it’s only to the extent that it’s so dorky. Nobody looks cool vaping.”
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