Not that any of you vape-happy hepcats who read The A.V. Club needed a reminder, but a recent study conducted by researchers at San Diego State University has concluded that vaping is, scientifically speaking, really fucking cool. Or, at least, it’s perceived to be cool by the people that do it. In the paper, published under the very uncool title of “Why do people use electronic nicotine delivery systems (electronic cigarettes)? A content analysis of Twitter, 2012-2015,” researchers present the conclusions they came to after mining Twitter for more than 3 million mentions of awesome keywords like “electronic cigarette,” “e-cigs,” and “vaping.”
What they found was that, over the course of those four years, people’s primary reasons for vaping have statistically evolved from wanting to quit cigarettes to simply looking cool. In fact, what Inverse calls “image-conscious vaping” increased 16 percent in 2015. Actual tweets were not included in the paper in the interest of privacy—although we’re pretty sure that you don’t tweet about vaping unless you want everyone to know—but representative sentiments, like “ecigs are so freaking cool and now I have one,” were compiled in this handy chart:
Whether vaping alone is enough to make one cool, or if you need to buy a matching fedora in order to achieve the desired effect, remains purely anecdotal.