By Barnaby Page, ECigIntelligence
Along with disposable bans, limits or prohibitions on flavours are often discussed as regulatory options in jurisdictions trying to reduce youth vaping.
But what happens to adult vapers when the range of available flavours is reduced? Do they simply switch to tobacco (or, if permitted, mint/menthol) flavour? Do they return to smoking combustible cigarettes? Or do they give up vaping completely?
Several recent surveys suggest flavour bans are a major potential changer of current vaper behaviour, though their implementation would not drive all e-cigarette users back to smoking.
One new UK study by a group of researchers from University College London found broad support for multiple restrictions on advertising and marketing among current vapers. These included proposals such as regulating point-of-sale advertising, limiting flavour descriptions and banning child-friendly imagery and branded packaging.
But the vapers who supported these measures said they would not want to see restrictions placed on the variety of flavours available. (Nor would they want measures that would increase the cost of e-cigarettes, such as additional taxes or minimum pricing.)
The small online survey included 548 responses sourced from social media in an effort to adequately represent younger vapers. Respondents listed how they felt about various commonly proposed vaping regulations in five categories, ranging from “strongly oppose” to “strongly support”. The survey also included space at the end for participants to provide context and further commentary about their decisions.
Overall, the results suggested vapers would be in support of some regulation to prevent youth vaping. But they felt that flavour restrictions would drive many adults either to the illicit market or back to conventional cigarettes.
Is it true that vapers would start smoking again after a flavour ban, though, severely undermining any public-health benefits of the ban? The evidence is mixed, but much of it concurs with what this survey implies. Some vapers would just accept the reduction in flavour availability, but some would indeed return to smoking, and some would turn to illicit products.
Another survey, conducted in the Netherlands, suggested that many e-cigarette users had stopped or reduced their vaping after flavours were removed from the market, although a substantial minority did not change their habits.
The Dutch survey, conducted by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), found that following the introduction of a flavour ban in the country, 22% of vapers had completely stopped vaping because of the flavour ban and 40% had reduced their consumption.
Moreover, what may be happening is that those Dutch vapers who have continued are crossing the border to buy flavoured vapes from stores in Germany – the equivalent in the UK would be buying flavoured products on the illicit market. (The researchers advocated for an EU-wide flavour ban to make cross-border purchases more difficult, increasing the effectiveness of the national ban.)
Along similar lines, in a recent report (Use of Vapes Among Adults in Great Britain, July 2025) from Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), 14% of British vapers felt that limits on vape flavours would likely lead to an increase in their smoking, and 19% anticipated that they would use illicit products.
People’s beliefs about their own responses to hypothetical future situations are, of course, not necessarily accurate. But it’s interesting that even in a what-if scenario where you might expect respondents to opt for a “responsible” answer, so many saw themselves taking courses of action that would not be the intention of a flavour ban at all.
For regulators, the decision to restrict flavours may look easy. After all, kids mostly don’t use tobacco or mint/menthol flavour, so superficially it might look like removing their preferred flavours from the market will discourage them from vaping. There are many problems with this assumption, however.
Flavoured products will probably still exist on the illicit market. Some young people will use tobacco flavour, if that is the only one available. And, of course, the public health gains achieved by converting adult smokers to vaping will be reduced if they start to smoke again – it is too often forgotten that many adults also prefer sweet and fruit flavours.
As these two surveys show, predicting exactly what will happen after a flavour ban is difficult. It will depend on patterns of consumer consumption in the specific country, and on the availability of the illicit market, for example. Cross-border sales, in person or via online ordering, may also enable consumers to acquire flavoured vapes in a country which bans them.
But if advocates of vaping are worried that their governments are considering flavour bans, they need to make the risks clear. Flavour bans will certainly stop some youth vaping. But they may well not solve the problem completely, and they may badly affect many adult vapers in the process, as well as contributing to the growth of an illicit, untaxed market.