It’s been a decade since Glossier launched in cloud of bubblegum-pink bubble wrap bags, making its way firmly into my millennial make-up bag staples. I’ll try to buy anything they make once.
You is my most repurchased fragrance, Cloud Paint a perennial on my vanity and Birthday Balm Dotcom migrating across various handbags. Even if Boy Brow was a dud on my untamable brows, I appreciated their general commitment to a wholesome vibe that suggested gym routines and green juices. I even had the Glossier-branded Nalgene, until I accidentally abandoned it at a particularly traumatic post-tequila hot yoga session.
So I was baffled by their choice of 10th birthday gift: a Chrome Collectible Zippo lighter engraved with the Glossier logos and the in-house mantra ‘You Look Good’, £45, lighter fluid not included. Although winkingly advertised next to a single lit birthday candle in Glossier’s signature cherry red, nobody is buying a Zippo on the off-chance you get called upon to light up someone’s celebration cake.
Was the ultimate Clean Girl brand trying to tell me smoking is cool now?
Scrolling back through my social media feed, more cult lighters jump out. Instagrammable smoking accessories from Edie Parker, the cool NYC girl brand formerly known for its range of acrylic clutch bags, are everywhere. The ‘modern lifestyle brand’ offers everything from over-the-top novelty table lighters in Seventies nightmare Jello salad trompe l’oeil form ($214.50) to dinky silver ‘swimsuits’ on keychains ($60.50) designed to hold your regular corner shop Bic lighter. There are even handbags with nifty built-in lighter clips to help you spark up on the go, or lend someone a light without them running off with it.
On the more masculine side is HUF, the trendy skate and streetwear brand. Along with hoodies, shackets, and pop culture collabs (HUF x Texas Chainsaw Massacre has arrived, right in time for Halloween), you can purchase a branded HUF Burner Lighter Sleeve Keychain for $25.
I’m in touch with the youth enough to know that vaping is now terribly passé, but have Gen Z — famous for their moralistic stance on drinking and fornication — really turned to ciggies? As far as I was aware they’re too busy refusing the drudgery of a nine-to-five (more power to them) to be picking up a penchant for smoke breaks.
The root of the trend is partly down, I suspect, to New York City’s decision to legalise cannabis for both recreational and medical purposes. With legalisation comes gentrification, and brands such as Edie Parker are eager to capitalise on a new consumer group of young and chic potheads. Women-run New York dispensary Gotham even has a very Glossier-style pink and red sans serif logo.
Weed is still very much a Class B drug in the UK, so you won’t find any natty spliff-adjacent accessories on sale here. Urban Outfitters is 100 per cent not cool any more with any generation, but tellingly the US website stocks an array of trendy ash trays, whereas the UK site has zero.
But Glossier is very much a cult brand here, and where New York fashion goes London is sure to follow if not surpass. With lighters becoming the must-have accessory, will cigarettes duly follow? We’ve not reached the point of adverts featuring models and celebrities actively smoking, but it’s snuck back into popular culture.
Singer Rosalía turned up to Charli XCX’s 32nd birthday bash clutching a huge bunch of black calla lilies stuffed with cigarettes, packets of Blue Parliaments artfully arranged between the blooms.
The Dare, producer of Charli XCX’s hit track ‘Guess’. His 2022 song Girls — now having a renaissance as a TikTok snippet — opens with the rousing smoking-is-cool lyrics “I like the girls that do drugs / Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club”. Julia Fox, another brat namecheck, once lit up a spliff backstage from customised lighter-bag made by none other than Edie Parker.
There’s also the uncomfortable undertone that, with skinny being “in” again (rip body positivity, we hardly knew ye) and Ozempic misuse running rampant, smoking’s reputation as an appetite suppressant could help it worm its way back into fashion. In the Twenties, Lucky Strike played on women’s insecurities with advertisements encouraging us to “reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”, as though smoking was a healthy alternative to snacking.
Smoking certainly can’t be marketed as healthy like it was in the 20th century. We know eight million people die before their time every year because of tobacco use, according to the WHO. It’s still the leading cause of preventable death in the UK. Life-long smokers knock an average of 10 years off their lifespan, and over half will die from smoking-related complications.
But, still, people smoke. There was outrage when the government suggested that smoking could be banned outside pubs for the sake of the nation. We seemingly can’t kick the habit of framing smoking as rebellious and a little bit sexy. And brands have obviously taken notice.
Will giving glossy, girly makeovers to these wildly addictive carcinogenic death sticks and their associated ephemera make it worse? Is it just a fad for being a bit grungy, a bit messy, that will die out along with brat summer in the winter chill? Or is it a darker, more nihilistic impulse — up there with not bothering to think about your pension — to refuse to care about your future when everything could be on fire/underwater by the time the carcinogens come home to roost?
I haven’t smoked since they banned Vogue Superslim Menthe in the great menthol cigarette purge. But I’ve always carried a lighter with me, for flirting purposes. Perhaps that becoming another vector I can be marketed to by brands in will be enough to put me off altogether.
