Rebecca Moore hits out at celebrities who ignore the risks and perpetuate the glamorous image of cigarettes

This week, Lana Del Rey smoked a Camel cigarette on stage at her show in Los Angeles. Within seconds, images of her looking entirely gorgeous and glamorous with a stick in her mouth, were circulating the internet.

As Chandler in Friends once said: Smoking is cool and you know it.

Of course it’s not actually cool – it likely kills you and damages others unlucky enough to be around you – but it does have the image of being cool.

It’s so James Dean or Lauren Bacall.

It’s so Leonard Cohen in a late-night American diner, talking poetically to the newest wayward traveller over strong coffee.

No matter how much we know intellectually that it greatly increases our chances of developing cancer or heart disease or various other terrible things we spend the rest of our lives detoxing from, smoking still seems cool, even if it’s in Summertown rather than Tinsel Town.

The problem is that the media never stopped telling us that it’s cool, even after the science began screaming otherwise. I have very close friends – friends who are concerned with their health (they pull a Carol Vorderman detox regularly), friends who are concerned about their ageing skin (they genuinely have chemical peels, regularly turning their faces into fresh-looking fillets of meat) and friends who are terrified of having low fertility (one even has her eggs on ice already). They are all either regular smokers, or social smokers. They all partake in a vice that most people know damages your body, ages your skin and which can even be seen to lower fertility. And they do this while missing the hilarious irony. Plenty of people smoke – I get that. I’m not judging those people.

I’ve been known to stick one of those little white sticks in my mouth in the past while drunk and wholly beyond caring.

But I am judging the media who seem intent on perpetuating the image that smoking’s cool and sexy.

Back when we didn’t know better, it was.

But now we do know better.

Smoking is as sexy as cancer. You know what cancer looks like? A great big black blob of horror, that’s what.

If anything’s ever gonna change, people in the public eye – people like Lana Del Rey who are influencing a whole generation of young people – should think twice before parading around stage, their smoking stick sliding sensually from their lips.

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