Jocelyn Altagracia knew her vaping had become a problem. Her then-boyfriend first handed her a Juul when she was 17 years old. Nearly a decade later, her habit wasn’t so fun anymore. If she dropped her vape in the toilet while she was out — which was often — she’d run from the bar to the corner store, grab a new one, and resume partying. “Every night, I would go to sleep with it next to me, then in the middle of the night, I would hit it if I got up to use the bathroom,” she said. “Like, why am I so addicted to something that can literally ruin my insides?” Her relationship with her vape was the longest one she’d ever been in.

It was time to quit. To satisfy her oral fixation, Altagracia sucked on toothpicks, straws, lollipops, Jolly Ranchers, and Life Savers. Her friends recommended leaving her vape in her car at night, but she’d always walk back to get it no matter how far away she had parked. When nothing else worked, she posted on TikTok, asking users to suggest their “most unhinged ways to quit vaping.” The comments delivered. “Every time I wanted to cave I told myself I was a weak little baby bitch,” one woman wrote. “Aww baby wants a vape? Grow up people are dying.” The most common response, Altagracia said, was that she should try to get pregnant. “People recommended slapping yourself with a rubber band,” she added. “I’m like, This is crazy work.” She quit cold turkey after that.

For a moment, vapes were as stylish of an accessory as a Telfar bag. It was hard to walk downtown without getting caught in a cloud of blueberry vapor. Now the conversation around vaping has shifted from begrudging acceptance to vocal disgust. Lina Edwards, a 26-year-old who works at a med spa in Ohio, remembers the first time she heard someone refer to a vape as an “adult pacifier.” The thought of sucking on a Watermelon Ice Elf Bar for comfort was embarrassing enough that she eventually quit. It added to the humiliation that her best friend often showed her men’s Hinge profiles that included responses like “Deal-breaker: you vape” or “No astrology, no vaping.” She’s not the only one who’s tired of sucking on a piece of plastic. After a decade of steady growth, e-cigarette sales have tumbled; in the U.S., they’ve fallen nearly every month over the past two years. Hitting the vape is now déclassé, a habit associated with teenagers and men who live in their parents’ basement.

But while vaping may not possess the cultural cachet it once did, posting about trying to quit certainly does. Making content about the quitting process (or #QuitNic, as it’s known on TikTok) has provided a path to virality for fledgling creators, some of whom are sucking on straws to satisfy their “mouth boredom,” griping about how ditching your vape feels like losing an eyeball, or hyping up their followers as they embark on this harrowing “journey” together. While some of these videos are genuinely useful for hopeful quitters, they’re also a convenient way to signpost that you, too, hate vapes.

“Have you heard? All the hot girls are quitting nic in 2025!” one TikToker posted to the tune of 664,000 views. In a sub-Reddit for women with ADHD, one user started a thread titled “This is your sign to stop vaping ❤️:” “Nicotine is exacerbating your depression, anxiety, and ADHD symptoms, and probably throwing in some new ones just for funsies,” she wrote. “Throw the vape away. Stop buying new ones. It’s over, girl.” Even Jade Cline from Teen Mom began documenting her quitting journey for her 452,000 TikTok followers. “I’m in my car talking like a straight-up dope fiend … I’m like, It’d only take me six minutes to get to the gas station and get me a vape real quick,” she said in a car-seat confessional. “I was praying this morning, like, God, please give me the strength to get off this vape … When does the misery end? When do the intrusive thoughts stop?”

While plenty of these videos house honest-to-God pleas for help, others endorse products intended for Gen-Z customers. Often, those products contain nicotine. “GRWM to quit with jones,” one creator captioned her TikTok about a brand that sells embossed tins of nicotine mints alongside Anna Wintour memes and photos of its product poking out of Ganni bags. Scroll through the app and you’ll spot people who swear by Blip, a brand that makes nicotine lozenges and Doja Cat–approved toothpicks in millennial pink and mint green. Chewable breather sticks, resembling tiny pastel dildos you can huff essential oils out of, are also popular, as are BoomBoom sticks, which you inhale. (“There’s no way this is legal. Like, these can’t be legal,” one TikToker says after shoving the stick up each nostril. “My nose has never felt so open before. I genuinely feel like I have so much energy right now.”) If none of that works, you can breathe in vitamins and plant residue from nicotine-free vapes like Luvv and Ripple+ or you can suck flavored air from brands like Füm and Pure, all of which content creators seem happy to push to their followers as they try anything and everything to quit together.

When Mia Persinger, a 25-year-old from Wisconsin, tried to quit, she chewed through 50 pieces of Mentos gum a day. Once, she drove to a busy highway 20 minutes from her house and threw her vape out the window of her car. After she got home, it took her all of five minutes to decide to go back; the vape was exactly where she left it in the grass. Fellow TikTokers have resorted to similarly desperate measures: Persinger has seen people “hitting” plastic straws to simulate the gesture of vaping, while others film themselves tossing their vapes in various bodies of water or crying over a graveyard of their dead e-cigarettes. I spoke to a woman who tried out hypnotherapy after she read about it on r/QuitVaping; the first practitioner she spoke with offered a $2,500 nicotine-cessation course, which included four hours of deep inner-child work (she didn’t take her up on it). Another TikTok commenter suggested, simply, “If you go to bed telling yourself you’re gonna die from vaping, then it’s easy to quit cold turkey tbh.”

In March, a 26-year-old health-care worker named Kyla also turned to strangers on the internet to hold herself accountable. An avid runner, she had already quit once to participate in a half-marathon last year but picked the habit back up shortly after. Hoping for a supportive nudge from her followers, she filmed herself drowning her final three vapes in glasses of water, each lighting up satisfyingly as they emitted their last bubbles of vapor. Kyla’s far from the first to murder her vapes in this manner, but her TikTok amassed 3.6 million views and counting — her most popular video to date. Since then, she has posted another 51 videos about her attempts at quitting and her frequent relapses. Kyla said she never intended for that first vape funeral to go viral — she just didn’t want to be alone in a process that turned out to be incredibly difficult. “It’s scary and sad how many people relate,” she said. “I had no idea.”

Like Kyla, many of the women I spoke to cited their health as one of the primary reasons they were giving up their dirty little habit. They didn’t want to be hospitalized with popcorn lung in their 20s, nor did they want fits of wheezing to keep them from doing the things they love, like yoga or other physical activities they can track on their Oura Rings. Their peers were giving up alcohol and joining run clubs; shouldn’t they try to emulate that behavior? Still, plenty of former vapers are just pivoting to cigarettes. “More of my friends are smoking cigs now than ever,” one 27-year-old told me. “Like, this is sad, but I’d rather smoke a cigarette than smoke a vape — because, aesthetically, that doesn’t really work for me.”

Altagracia is still vape free, although she has had to ask her friends and her manager at work not to smoke in front of her so she won’t be tempted. Every once in a while, she still thinks about hitting her vape, getting that irreplaceable buzz one more time. But despite her cravings, she has stayed strong — mostly because she hopes to be a mom in the not-so-distant future. And hopefully by the time she gets pregnant, she’ll be satisfied knowing she didn’t do so as a means to quit.