A-listers are swapping their cigarettes for vapes... but are they safe or a con?

The glory days of Old Hollywood seemed to be back at this year’s Golden Globes. Leonardo DiCaprio was giving it great Gatsby as he sucked daringly on a cigarette all night; while over in London, February’s party bonanza was flooded with images of stars happily inhaling indoors, from Lily Allen at the BRITs, Kate Moss at London Fashion Week and Michael Fassbender at the BAFTAs. Smoking hasn’t felt this glam since legendary US Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland puffed unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes from her ebony and onyx holder in La Côte Basque in 1970s New York.

Except that this is a lot of hot air. Literally. These ‘cigarettes’ are e-cigarettes, which can be legally ‘smoked’ inside bars, clubs and pubs. DiCaprio, Allen, Moss and Fass were not smoking but ‘vaping’ — inhaling the vapour created by a battery-heated cartridge filled with liquid nicotine. The mechanism is concealed in a cylinder that resembles a cigarette.

According to certain experts, vapes, as the trendies call them, are healthier than a Caramel Frappuccino. Professor John Britton, who leads the tobacco advisory group for the Royal College of Physicians, stated that nicotine’s side effects are ‘on a par with the effects you get from caffeine’. Others are concerned about the long-term side effects, which the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) states ominously as ‘unknown’.

Yet even Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the fearsome body that banned us from puffing in pubs in 2007, concedes that nicotine vapour is safer for you than tobacco. And certainly, the emergence of the e-cigarette, invented in China in 2003 by chemist Hon Lik and marketed as a way to get people off fags, has thrown the cat among the pigeons with the tobacco giants. The UK e-cigarette market has soared from £23.9 million in 2012 to its current £91.3 million, while a projection by Bloomberg Industries shows e-cigarette sales could surpass those of traditional tobacco products in the US by as early as 2023.

Will Hill from British American Tobacco (BAT), the world’s second largest tobacco company, claims he’s not worried about the e-cig onslaught, although the company has just launched its own e-cig, Vype, with a sleek TV ad. Hill adds: ‘We are not claiming they are “safe” in an absolute sense.’ Rather, they are ‘part of our harm-reduction approach and complement our existing products by enabling us to offer adult consumers a range of potentially reduced-risk products’.

Which doesn’t sound very sexy. Although sex and e-cigs could be a thing of the past if the MHRA gets its way to regulate e-cigarettes like a medicine, a proposal currently under consideration by the Committee of Advertising Practice. It would mean a tightening up of distribution and advertising rules. Another TV ad by e-cig company VIP, starring Joey Essex and model Amy Willerton, was last week banned from pre-11pm screening by the Advertising Standards Agency following accusations of sexing up the act of smoking. (It was littered with lines such as ‘I want you to put it in my mouth’ from lip-glossed Willerton.)

I’m not a regular cigarette smoker but I’ve taken to puffing on friends’ e-cigs and it does feel sexy. You can choose from what one friend calls the ‘trainer bra’ variety (the cigarette lookalikes you can buy from Sainsbury’s) before progressing to the full Rigby & Peller: rechargeable kits complete with USB chargers and flavours such as watermelon from companies such as eGo, E-Lites, Vapouriz and Skycig.

Bruno Mars recently signed up to become a major investor in NJOY, one of the US’ leading electronic cigarette companies. He did it, he said, to keep his pledge to his mother, who died of a brain aneurysm, to become tobacco-free. Stephen Dorff, meanwhile, has become the face of Blu e-cigs (‘It’s time we take our freedom back. Come on, guys: rise from the ashes’). Kevin Spacey tries to get a vape habit in series two of House of Cards following his wife’s advice that vice presidents don’t smoke. Other vape veterans include Britney Spears, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Jack Nicholson and Katy Perry, although at this year’s BRITs she allegedly sneaked in a real fag because it looked so much like a vape… for a few seconds.

Society gadabout Nicky Haslam premiered his new look at this year’s pre-BAFTA party at Annabel’s: a glass of Veuve Clicquot in one hand and a purple metallic cylinder in the other. He declared the Shishaa model filled with grape e-liquid to be ‘rather a good look’.

Elizabeth Playel, 21, works at London’s ritziest vape shop, V-Revolution in Covent Garden. With its gleaming wares and displays of shiny components it puts you in mind of John Travolta’s chic heroin kit in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. She observes: ‘In general, men prefer tobacco-flavoured liquid nicotine,’ whereas girls like flavours such as tiramisu and champagne. Playel uses V-Revolution’s slimline silver ‘Sydney’ when she’s dressing to impress, or for ‘a bit of a heavier night’ she’ll use her ‘Tokyo’, which is bigger ‘but you can vary the voltage to increase the amount of nicotine vapour you create’. Davide Inda, co-founder of the Italian-owned V-Revolution, says that while he was researching the UK vape market he was shocked that we were ‘so behind. There are over 200 vape stores in Italy.’

Playel says that the French are her most discerning customers. Indeed, France, with its tradition of glamorous smoking (from the 19th- century Club des Hashischins frequented by Baudelaire and Dumas to Jean-Paul Belmondo in À Bout de Souffle), has one of Europe’s most thriving vape cultures. ‘Even if we give up smoking,’ legendary Paris Match society editor Agathe Godard tells me, ‘ “La gestuelle” [the art of doing cool things with your hands] is still essential to the French.’