How IQOS heated tobacco is changing the way we vape
Over the years, the act and art of smoking has changed significantly. Smoking has been around since ancient times in one form or another, with a history of smoking various substances for pleasure, medicine and spiritual purposes being documented as far back as 5000BC.
Tobacco, a native plant of North and South America, became popular on a global scale after the arrival of European explorers to the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The attractiveness of tobacco saw it grow rapidly into a major industry, even after encountering the scientific controversies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Although historically the most common way of using tobacco has been to smoke it in pipes and cigarettes, the plant has also been consumed over time, to a lesser extent, in different forms such as chewing, sniffing and sucking, none of which have proved as popular as cigarettes. In very recent years, new methods have been developed, as consumers have continued to move away from smoking and are looking for suitable alternatives, with technology answering the call.
There has been a little confusion around vaping, e-cigarettes and heat-not-burn products, with people wondering what those phrases actually mean and how the products work, compared to smoking cigarettes.
With a traditional cigarette, the dried tobacco needs to combust to produce smoke, which happens after heating at around 400 degrees Celsius and reaching temperatures of up to 900 degrees when the user is puffing on the cigarette.
E-cigarettes have been on the market since the early 2000s. An e-cigarette, also known as a vape, is a device which uses a battery to heat a specially produced liquid solution to a temperature of around 300 degrees Celsius. This temperature is high enough to produce vapour from the liquid, which is then inhaled by the user. Due to the trend of moving away from smoking, people using e-cigarettes in public have become an increasingly common sight, if somewhat perplexing for observers, as often a startlingly large cloud of vapour can be seen engulfing the user before quickly dissipating.
However, new types of heat-not-burn products have been developed in the last few years and are now on the market, such as IQOS, which heats real tobacco in a battery-powered device, rather than heating a liquid as an e-cigarette does. This results in a more discreet experience than the large, white cloud of vapour from an e-cigarette.
The IQOS has been designed to come close to the experience of smoking a cigarette but without any smoke, of course, which means no ash and no lingering smell or second-hand smoke. It also produces less vapour than its cousin, the e-cigarette, with users reporting it has the old-school look and feel of a traditional cigarette. This might just be modern technology's answer to a centuries-old tradition.