‘I gave out bowls of cigarettes to my wedding ceremony visitors’

It has been 162 days since my last cigarette, not that I’m counting or anything. I won’t and can’t smoke until the baby I’m carrying is born in September, but already I know this doesn’t mean I’m giving up.

My first postnatal cigarette will be far more dignified than my first-ever cigarette, which I had at 14 years old, having bartered with the local drunk to buy ten Lambert & Butler from the corner shop for me and my friends.

This time, I’ve asked my husband to deliver me a nicely wrapped packet of Newports as my ‘push present’.

It seems I’m not the only young woman to crave the instant pleasure of a smoke. Studies show that younger middle-class women are smoking more cigs than they used to, with the figure up by 3 per cent since 2013.

Surely smoking isn’t becoming glamorous again? At New York Fashion Week earlier this year, American label Retrofete sent models strutting down the catwalk with a half-smoked cigarette between their fingers. Of course, the reaction was hysterical.

The New York Post ran with ‘Experts sound alarm as cigarettes become a trend on NYFW runways’, with quotes from a cardiopulmonary specialist warning that if the trend keeps up, we could expect to see ‘increased risk of cancer, heart disease and lung diseases like COPD, emphysema, chronic bronchitis and lung cancer’.

The director of an anti-smoking lobby group warned that marketing cigarettes as ‘trendy’ could lead young people to think they are safe to use.

Well, young people do smoke — but we do know the health risks too. As if the relentless anti-smoking campaigns of the last few decades could be erased with one — let’s be honest — chic runway show.

No, the reason we smoke has its roots in the answer given by creative director for the label, Ohad Seroya: ‘When you come to somebody and [are] asking for a lighter and creating a conversation. This is why I miss smoking.’

He’s right. I don’t smoke every day and when I do it’s no more than five or six, but many of the best conversations I’ve ever had have taken place in the smoking area. Everybody I know in their 20s (I’m 26) says the same, and those in their 30s, who have reluctantly given up, talk wistfully about the exchanges of their own cigarette days.

It’s only when you stop — when you’re confined to the dancefloor or the sweaty main room of an event, away from the familiar warmth and buzz of the outdoor heater — that you realise just how dull everybody else is. The interesting ones are busy getting their nicotine fix.

It isn’t just catwalks. After two decades or so of censorship, Hollywood has started to welcome back its old, trusty friend tobacco. In Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, there were 137 instances of tobacco use between the cigarettes and pipes.

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, about an Oxford University student invited back to his friend’s estate for a summer of debauchery, saw posh twentysomethings smoking throughout.

In The Holdovers — one of the best U.S. films of last year — set in a prep school, smoking is integral to the plot.

Screenwriter David Hemingson says: ‘Cigarettes contraband is traded in high schools because everybody wants to be cool and mature. So it felt true to the prep school experience to me.’

Gen Z — those aged 12 to 27, a group to which I begrudgingly belong — has managed to become the most sexless, abstinent, annoying and entitled generation in history. (‘We made a bad batch!’ I recently heard a Gen Xer and a millennial joke, discussing a junior colleague who had asked his boss to do his work so he could have a ‘mental health day’. Yes, somehow, we’re worse than millennials.)

Its members spend their days gluing themselves to roads or barricading themselves on university campuses in the name of Hamas… and now they’re resurrecting the art of smoking.

They were meant to be the first generation that marked the end of smoking, but that theory’s gone up in a puff of it.

While the majority go for disposable vapes (29 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds), Gen Z does love nicotine. We’re even bringing back cigar and pipe smoking.

Data collated by University College London shows that 772,800 adults (of all ages) were exclusively smoking cigars or pipes, or shisha, in England in September 2023, a huge increase from 151,200 in September 2013.

Pipe and cigar smoking is highest in the 18 to 24-year-old group, with 3 per cent of 18-year-olds exclusively smoking cigars or pipes in 2023, compared with just 1 per cent of 65-year-olds.

We know there are downsides to smoking — but we do it anyway. The biggest for me, in fact, is the incessant nannying you get from everybody around you.

‘That’ll kill you one day,’ a nosey patron will tell you as you head out to the smoking area of the pub, and he sinks his tenth pint of the day. The pot head who exclusively smokes blunts (marijuana cigarettes) will tell you how Big Tobacco is trying to kill you.

And my mother is fuming at the fact that, although I have abstained for seven months so far, and ten months all in all, I am not planning to quit.

Experts point out that of course there are far fewer smokers than there were in 1970 — something like a third as many, according to Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Simon Clark, director of the smokers’ group Forest tells me smoking peaked in the UK in the 1950s when 80 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women were regular puffers. ‘Seventy years later, having been in decline for most of that time, smoking rates are currently at their lowest ever levels, with fewer than 13 per cent of the population still smoking.’

So why are smoking-related cancers at an all-time high? It was recently reported that 160 new cases are being diagnosed per day in the UK. Simon isn’t sure, but suggests ‘given the nature of cancer, there will be some lag effect’.

‘But even if the lag time was 30 or 40 years, smoking-related cancer cases would have surely reached their peak in the 1980s or 1990s,’ he adds.

Meanwhile, 35 health experts and charities are sending a letter to Health Secretary Wes Streeting calling for ministers to end ‘smoking’, presumably by sticking to the previous government’s plans of making it illegal for those born after January 1, 2009, ever to buy cigarettes.

Yet the problem with the Government outlawing cigarettes is that it only makes them sexier. It’s why we all started — crouching behind the school bike sheds, terrified of being caught by teachers. It’s why, after decades of anti-smoking campaigns, restrictive laws and huge price rises, young people, particularly women, are still puffing away, well aware of the cancer risks.

Indeed, the war on smoking has done the exact opposite of what it wanted; it has created a renaissance of smoking by people who are simply sick of being told what to do.

Last year, for example, Canada passed a law that saw health warning labels printed on individual cigarettes.

The internet went wild over how chic they looked and young people scrambled to get their hands on the Instagrammable cigs that said things like, ‘Poison in every puff’ and ‘Cigarettes cause cancer’. Perfect fodder for a social media snap. We are seduced, too, by the images of cigarettes created by our parents’ generation — the same one now wringing their hands so earnestly over our habits.

I’m watching Sex And The City for the first time and while Carrie Bradshaw may be a lot of things — naive, aggravating, gauche — she sure looks great with a cigarette hanging from her lip. Women smokers have modern-day Bradshaws to look up to in the form of actresses Anya Taylor-Joy and Jennifer Lawrence.

Natalie Portman was photographed sharing a fag with actor Paul Mescal outside a London bar this summer. Even health-obsessed Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow sparks up once a week. She said in an interview: ‘It’s what makes life interesting, finding the balance between cigarettes and tofu. My one light American Spirit that I smoke on Saturday night.’

We even have our own aspirational fag company. Hestia is that extraordinary thing — a new tobacco firm, its founder, David Sley, dubbed the ‘Millennial Marlboro Man’.

After becoming what The New York Times describes as ‘The viral cigarette of 2023,’ Sley said: ‘We will make sure the best and brightest are enjoying the very finest. I am trying to reframe tobacco as something that can be enjoyed responsibly like any other product.’

This is why you’ll see Hestias pop up at exclusive parties and events filled with social media influencers and models. I had bowls of Hestia at my wedding for guests to take. Indeed, tobacco influencers are a whole subsection of social media now, with their own label — ‘cigfluencers’.

The last time I posted online about smoking, the reaction from readers was far from what I expected. Aside from the few comments about how bad my skin would look when I hit 40 (which I reject because I’ll be knee deep in Botox by then), hundreds of people contacted me to tell me about their favourite memories of smoking cigarettes.

People feel deeply nostalgic about it. Husbands detailed how they fell in love with their wives in the smoking area and how, after years of abstinence, they longed to go back to that time.

Women emailed to say that while they’ve been smoke-free for 30 years, not a day goes by when they don’t crave the sensation of the first drag of a smoke. One man sent a long email about how he had taken up smoking at 65, after not touching one his entire life.

He added that it was the best thing he had ever done and had transformed his social life.

According to official guidelines, there is technically no safe smoking limit, but to me — and I recognise this is controversial — the joy that the odd cigarette brings seems worth the risk.

The truth is, the more smoking is outlawed and taxed, the more determined young people like me will become to find a way to do it. And the cooler it will become.