The water bottle has a secret compartment. Tucked inside, where you might expect a sports cap or a measuring line, sits a vape, hidden well enough to slip past a teacher or a parent doing a bag check. Somebody filmed it, set it to upbeat music, and posted it. People liked it. A lot of people, as it turns out.
That clip is one of dozens catalogued in a new study from the University of East Anglia, published in Addiction, that pulls apart a question most of us never think to ask: when a teenager goes looking for information about vaping, what do they actually find? The answer depends almost entirely on where they look, and the two main places offer wildly different stories.
The team ran parallel searches, simulating an ordinary user rather than relying on scraped datasets. On Google, they screened the first six pages of results and ended up with 18 educational resources, the sort of thing produced by the NHS, charities, public health bodies. On TikTok, they worked through eight hashtags chosen to surface the illegal end of the market: #noIDvape, #puffbundles, #hiddennic and others. That left 58 videos to code. “Our research shows that young people encounter very different messages about illicit vapes depending on where they look online,” says Dr Emma Ward of UEA’s Norwich Medical School.
Different is putting it mildly. The educational material was, by and large, accurate and responsible, rating “good” overall in just over half of cases. But it had a habit of treating illegal vapes as an afterthought, a paragraph bolted onto a broader vaping explainer.
Not one of the 18 resources scored top marks for depicting the specific health risks of illicit devices, and nearly a quarter said nothing about those risks at all. Many of them, frankly, read like homework. Walls of text, a stern tone, the occasional limp instruction along the lines of “if you are a child, do not vape.” The kind of thing a 14-year-old scrolls straight past.
Where Defiance Is the Product
The TikTok side could hardly have been more different in flavour. “In contrast, TikTok content is far less regulated and often presents illegal vaping as conventional or even desirable,” says Ward.
And the numbers behind that are striking. Across the sample, the most common themes were apathy toward the law (in 57 per cent of videos), humour (50 per cent) and a sense of shared subculture (also 50 per cent), and together the videos tagged with those themes had racked up something like 21 million likes by the time the researchers tallied them, which gives you a rough sense of the audience these clips command compared with a council webpage nobody shares. Nearly half the videos showed illicit use in a positive light. One sub-theme stood out above all the rest: the simple thrill of breaking the rules, a category the team labelled “satisfaction from rule breaking,” which on its own pulled in 24.5 million likes. Defiance, it seems, is the product. Not the vape so much as the getting-away-with-it.
Then there’s the marketing, which is where things get properly sly. Sellers were disguising devices inside cosmetic or confectionery “bundles”, the lip-gloss-and-sweets aesthetic doing double duty as camouflage against age checks. “What stood out was how inconsistently illicit vaping is addressed across platforms,” says Eleanor Bray, a research associate in UEA’s School of Psychology. One bundle in the sample went by the name “pink baddie bundle”. Trendy, harmless-sounding, and built to evade.
It’s worth saying what “illicit” actually means here, because it isn’t just a moral label. In the UK, these are products that flout the 2016 regulations: nicotine over the 20 milligram-per-millilitre cap, oversized tanks, missing health warnings. Some are counterfeit and can be loaded with THC or Spice, a synthetic cannabinoid. Since June 2025, disposable vapes have been banned too, which sweeps a whole further category into the illegal column. So a teenager celebrating a cheap, no-questions-asked purchase on camera may be advertising something rather more dangerous than they realise.
Meeting Teenagers Where They Already Are
The researchers are careful not to cast social media as simply the villain. Their argument runs the other way, in fact: if young people already live on these platforms and trust them for information, then health messaging that ignores them is messaging that misses. “This fragmented online environment is concerning,” as Ward puts it, and the study lands at a pointed moment, just weeks after the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026 received royal assent. The team’s blunt reading is that legislation alone will not be enough so long as video platforms keep feeding teenagers unregulated content dressed up as entertainment.
What might work instead is harder, and slower, and depends on treating young people as collaborators rather than targets. “Public health messaging is more likely to be effective when it works with young people and the platforms they already use,” says Bray. Whether anyone can make a genuinely good public-health TikTok, one that earns its 24 million likes honestly rather than by glamorising the very thing it warns against, is the open question. The illicit subculture has, for now, the better content. Closing that gap might matter more than any new law on the books.
DOI: 10.1111/add.70476
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes a vape “illicit” rather than just underage?
In the UK an illicit vape is one that breaks the 2016 product regulations, not simply one sold to someone too young. That can mean nicotine above the 20 milligram-per-millilitre limit, oversized tanks, or missing health labelling, and since June 2025 it also covers disposable vapes, which are now banned outright. Some counterfeit devices go further still, carrying illegal substances like THC, which is part of why researchers treat them as a distinct danger.
Why does it matter where a teenager looks for vaping information?
Because the message changes completely depending on the source. Official health pages tend to be accurate but dry, often mentioning illegal vapes only in passing, while TikTok serves up entertaining, glamorising content that frames breaking the rules as fun. When the engaging version is also the misleading one, the accurate information loses the competition for attention.
How are sellers getting around age checks on social media?
One tactic flagged in the research is disguising vapes inside cosmetic or confectionery “bundles”, marketed with trendy, harmless-sounding names. The packaging doubles as camouflage, making the product look like makeup or sweets rather than a nicotine device. It is a deliberate way to slip past both platform moderation and age verification.
Could social media actually help reduce youth vaping rather than fuel it?
That is exactly what the researchers argue. They suggest public health campaigns should work with young people and the platforms they already use, rather than retreating to traditional websites teenagers ignore. The catch is that the illicit subculture currently produces far more compelling content, so any genuine health message would have to compete on the same engaging terms.
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