E-Cigs Go to Hollywood

It’s a well-known fact that smoking tobacco can do serious harm to you – at least, it has become a well-known fact in the last few decades. It isn’t surprising, then, that a whole industry has sprung up around the desire to quit smoking, with everything from pads to pills to medical treatments to cleanses, exercise routines, and everything else you can think of that could possibly impact your body and mind in some way that might possibly potentially some day lead to quitting smoking.

Of course, all of those treatments focus on ridding you of the chemical aspect of smoking, but doctors are coming to realize that compared to the chemical addiction to nicotine that you get from smoking, the psychological habit is just as strong, and sometimes stronger. That’s why e-cigs were developed, but for a long time, if you smoked an e-cig people looked at you weird. After all, with its shiny black casing, LED tip lit up, and pleasant-smelling vapor, it just didn’t seem to fit.

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Fortunately for those of us who want to finally quit smoking for good, e-cigs have really taken off, largely thanks to their popularity among celebrities. Fringe trends go to Hollywood to die and be reborn as mainstream cool, and e-cigs are no different; with the top names in film vaping e-cigs both on and off the camera, it is becoming increasingly normal to use an e-cig. After all, seeing some random person on the street smoking an e-cig is notable until you’ve seen celebs on the red carpet doing the same thing for years. Then it’s just another day in paradise.

Don’t believe us? Who better to vape e-cigs than celebrities, people whose paycheck relies on their face staying young and fresh and their voice being strong and flexible? Smoking cigarettes prematurely ages you and makes your voice hoarse and raspy – unpleasant thoughts for any working actor or actress. Check out this list of celebrities who regularly partake in the vape to dodge all those nasty side-effects:

     1. Leonardo DiCaprio

Go big or go home, right? Leo started his career with Titanic, the film that men loved to hate, but let’s be honest – it’s a great movie, and he has picked a lot of winners since then too, including The Departed (awesome), Inception (mind-bending), and The Great Gatsby (beautiful). The man is a big supporter of green energy and the health of the planet, too – he drives a Nissan Leaf and is very vocal about it, after all! It’s no wonder he cares about his own health as well. He was even recently spotted vaping an e-cig at the Golden Globes while mixing with some other A-listers.

      2. Katherine Heigl

You may remember Heigl from Grey’s Anatomy and Knocked Up, but what we know her for is her early and vocal support for e-cigs. She was vaping as early as 2010, and even went on Letterman vaping one! While she started with e-cig models that resemble an actual cigarette, like many e-cig users she eventually moved on to more advanced models that seem like something Spock would smoke.

     3. Sean Penn

Sean Penn gets a lot of hate these days – from his shenanigans in Iraq to his vocal political activism, he has become the poster boy for “entitled Hollywood actorvist.” Whether you agree with his politics and rhetoric or not, though, you can’t deny that he can, on occasion, be a true badass. That’s why it’s so awesome that he uses e-cigs as well, which he was actually spotted using during the Clinton Global Initiative in 2013. Of course, that’s what’s so awesome about e-cigs: anytime, anywhere, even if you happen to be at an international NGO’s annual event being covered live.

     4. Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Louis-Dreyfus is best-known for her role as Elaine on Seinfeld, and although she has done a ton of work since then – most recently on Veep, which continues to win awards and viewers – she will always be Elaine in our hearts. Considering how beautiful she is, it isn’t surprising that she was spotted using an e-cig during the Golden Globe Awards; why would she want to give up even an inch of how attractive she is?

There are more, of course – Katy Perry, Dennis Quaid, Britney Spears, and Jack freaking Nicholson. These names should give you some idea of why it is becoming more and more common for the man or woman on the street (or in the office) to vape an e-cig: when celebrities are seen doing it on a regular basis, it makes it cool for everyone else to get in on it. Let’s just hope that the health benefits keep everyone vaping for some time to come!