What are you really inhaling when you vape? What science has found — and what the industry does not advertise

When it emerged as an alternative to cigarettes, vaping seemed a straightforward promise: the same gesture, the same satisfaction, without the tar and 4,000 substances found in combustion smoke. For many people it was a reasoned choice. But the science of 2023–2025 is adding chapters the industry prefers not to highlight.

Every vaping device works with a metal coil — a heating element that brings the liquid to vaporisation temperature. This is where the problem begins, one that research has only started measuring with precision in recent years.

In 2024, researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) analysed a wide range of devices — cartridge-based, tank-based, and disposable — and published an unequivocal conclusion in Environmental Health Perspectives, one of the most authoritative scientific journals in environmental and public health:

The source of the problem is physical: coils are made of metal alloys — nichrome (80% nickel, 20% chromium), stainless steel, brass. Every heating cycle microscopically degrades the metal surface. Those particles end up in the vapour. They end up in the lungs.

The most recent and alarming data concerns disposable devices — the single-use electronic cigarettes that have become the dominant format on the European market. A 2025 UC Davis study found that one of the models tested released more lead during a single day's use than nearly 20 packs of traditional cigarettes.^⁴

Formaldehyde is another compound detected in vaping vapour — and this is where the research demands precision. Under normal conditions of use, the levels detected in studies are generally lower than those in combustion cigarette smoke. This is a real finding that must not be distorted.

However, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine documented that under coil overheating conditions — which can occur with any device, especially at high power settings — formaldehyde in the vapour can exceed that present in a traditional cigarette by 5 to 15 times.^⁵ The variable is the device, the power setting, the state of the coil. The average user has no way of knowing this.

Beyond the chemical question of the vapour, there is a second finding that research over recent years has made increasingly solid: vaping does not resolve nicotine dependence. It transfers it.

An international study published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research in 2024 followed users of electronic cigarettes and smokers in Canada, England and the United States between 2017 and 2022. The conclusion is clear:

The figures from the 2023 Truth Initiative survey — conducted on a national US sample — confirm the clinical picture: 73% of daily users report a compulsive urge to vape, 63% have tried to stop without success, and 44% openly identify themselves as dependent on vaping.^³ Nicotine dependence does not change. What changes is only the device used to maintain it.

Cigarettes have a toxicological history spanning decades. The link between smoking and lung cancer, cardiovascular disease and COPD is documented by thousands of studies involving millions of people over fifty years. Vaping has existed as a mass phenomenon for less than fifteen years. Long-term studies simply do not yet exist — not because the problem is absent, but because the time needed to detect it has not yet passed.

A meta-analysis published in BMC in 2024, which analysed 119 studies, found that people who use e-cigarettes without ever having smoked are almost twice as likely to develop breathing problems — coughing, shortness of breath, phlegm — as people who use nothing at all.^⁷ This is not yet definitive proof about long-term effects. But it is a signal that research is beginning to pick up.

Beyond chemical dependence on nicotine, there is a component that research has only recently begun to measure with precision: dependence on the gesture. In 2025, researchers from the Addiction Medicine Unit at the University of Verona published a finding in Frontiers in Public Health that changes how we understand the habit:

In practical terms: the gesture of bringing the hand to the mouth, repeated thousands of times, becomes an autonomous mechanism for emotional regulation and stress relief. Do the maths — 15 puffs per cigarette or device, 20 sessions a day, 365 days a year. Over ten years that exceeds one million repetitions encoded into muscle memory. This neurological pattern does not disappear by eliminating nicotine or changing the device. It persists until it finds a physical substitute.

It is no coincidence that many people choose vaping over patches or gum: they intuitively know that the gesture matters as much as the substance. Research now confirms this with data. Breazy starts from this same intuition — and takes it to its logical conclusion.

If the problem of vaping is not just nicotine but also what the coils release into the vapour, the logical question is: is there a way to preserve the gesture — that pause, that physical satisfaction — without introducing any of these substances into the body?

That is precisely the question Breazy answers. No heating coil. No heat. No vaporised liquid. Just air through a natural aromatic core that provides the sensory stimulus of the hand-to-mouth gesture without producing any chemical vapour.