Is Vaping Vegan? I Did the Digging So You Don’t Have To *

*Collab

If you’ve been around here a while, you’ll know I read the label on absolutely everything. I’ve stood in many a supermarket aisle squinting at the back of a packet trying to work out whether something sneaky has crept in, and honestly, half the fun is the detective work.

The one thing I’d never actually thought to check was vaping. A couple of mates have swapped the cigarettes for a vape over the last year, and one of them asked me, half joking, whether their fruity little vape was even vegan. I had no clue. So, being the nosy sort, I went and found out, and it turned out to be far more interesting than I bargained for.

So what’s actually in a vape?

Strip it right back, and there are only four things in most e-liquid, which surprised me for a start. I’d always assumed it was some big mysterious chemical soup. If you fancy the proper deep-dive, what’s actually in e-liquid is laid out really clearly, but here’s the short version for fellow label-readers:

• Vegetable glycerine (VG), the thick stuff that makes the cloud. It’s made from plant oils like coconut or soy, so it’s vegan. The name rather gives it away.
• Propylene glycol (PG), which carries the flavour. It’s made in a lab from petroleum, so no animal goes anywhere near it.
• Nicotine, which comes from the tobacco plant or is made synthetically. Either way, plant or lab, not animal.
• Flavourings, and this is where it gets a bit murky, so it gets its own bit below.

Three out of four, no drama whatsoever. It was the flavourings that sent me down the rabbit hole.

The bits that caught me out

Most flavours are synthetic or fruit-based, so your mango, your rhubarb and custard, your blue raspberry whatever, are almost always grand. The “custard” is just a flavour compound by the way, not actual dairy, which did make me chuckle. Nobody’s stirring Ambrosia into the bottle.

A few things are worth a proper squint at the label though:

• Honey or beeswax. If honey is listed as a flavour, that’s a no for vegans.
• Carmine (cochineal, or E120). That’s the crushed-beetle red colouring you might already dodge in sweets and cordials. It pops up occasionally in red-coloured liquids. Most vape juice is clear, so it’s rare, but it does exist.
• Lactic acid. Usually synthetic, but it can be dairy-derived, and annoyingly the label won’t always tell you which.

The frustrating part is that UK rules don’t make brands print a full ingredients list on the bottle, even though they have to register everything with the regulator first. So the simple answer is to buy from brands that are open about what goes in, and to give honey-flavoured anything a miss.

The animal testing thing

This is the bit most “is vaping vegan” articles skip right over, and for me it’s the one that matters most. Plant-based ingredients are only half the story. The other half is whether any of it was tested on animals along the way.

Some of these ingredients have a history of animal testing for safety years back, the same as loads of food and cosmetics, and you can’t exactly undo that now. The slightly better news is that UK and EU rules these days actively discourage fresh animal testing on this stuff, which is more than you can say for some other parts of the world. If cruelty-free is your line in the sand, look for brands that actually say so out loud, and lean towards liquid made over here.

The bit that genuinely surprised me

Right, this is the one I had to tell everyone about. If you’re vegan and still smoking actual cigarettes, brace yourself, because cigarettes are wildly less vegan than any vape.

Some cigarette filters have been found to contain porcine haemoglobin. That’s pig’s blood, used as a binding agent. There’s also castoreum, which is a gunk squeezed from beavers’ glands, used over the years to flavour tobacco, and beeswax gets in on it too. So the fruity vape my mate was side-eyeing is, hands down, the more plant-based of the two. Who knew.

So, is vaping vegan?

For the vast majority of what’s on the shelf, yeah, it genuinely is. The base is plant or lab-made, the nicotine’s plant or lab-made, and most flavours are absolutely fine. You just want to keep half an eye out for:

• Honey in the flavour name
• Carmine in bright red liquids
• A clear cruelty-free or vegan-friendly note if testing bothers you
• Plain metal-and-glass kit rather than the leather-wrapped fancy ones

Do that and you’re sorted in about ten seconds, which by my label-reading standards is an absolute dream. One of the easier ones I’ve had to investigate, and I came out the other side knowing far more about beavers than I ever planned to.

If you’ve made the switch yourself and you’ve got a brand you rate, drop it in the comments. You know I’m always nosy about a good recommendation!