Charlie Rabone is explaining the conditions required for the Os, or vapour rings, he blows. “You have to think about the wind, the climate – all sorts,” says the 20-year-old from Stockport. He wears a sweatshirt and a trucker cap from Humble Juice Co, a US manufacturer whose Hop Scotch vape liquid tastes of coffee, vanilla and butterscotch. “The air has to be super-dead,” he adds. “Even the heat from radiators can ruin it.”

He raises his Asmodus Minikin 2 “mod” to his lips and inhales. The battery-powered device, which costs £90 and is the size of a pack of cards, heats a coil inside the rebuildable dripping atomiser (RDA), which screws on to the top of the mod. Rabone has dripped juice on to the cotton wick around the coil. When he breathes in, the liquid turns to vapour. After a couple of seconds, he cocks his head and exhales. Pressing his mouth into an oval, Rabone forms a vapour ring before raising his left hand and pushing it from behind. The ring grows and accelerates. “I can do a jellyfish as well,” he says. “You blow an ‘O’ and keep a bit of vape in your mouth, and then blow that out into a little cloud, which looks like a ghost. Then it goes into the ‘O’ and wraps around it to look like a jellyfish. People can do mad things.”

Rabone is part of a dedicated tribe of “cloud chasers”, who tinker with their juices and gear to produce the biggest possible vape clouds. Some cloud chasers in turn belong to a tribe of “trick vapers”, who gather, like skaters, to show off their moves. Rabone works at Elite Cigs, a Manchester chain of vape stores, having walked through the door two years ago to try his first vape. Today he is at Vape Jam, a public trade fair now in its fourth year at the Excel centre in London.

‘I can do a jellyfish as well’: Charlie Rabone, who works for a Manchester chain of vape stores. All photographs: Mikael Buck for the Guardian

The young vaper is one of the estimated 3 million people in the UK who have embraced what began as a utilitarian quitting aid. “I never even smoked,” Rabone says. “My mum and dad both smoked, so I think I never wanted to. But then I saw vaping and thought: ‘Yeah, I can get on board with that.’ I like the hobby side of it – building my coils, trying to get the biggest cloud. I was like: ‘That looks cool.’ And then I wanted to master it.”

Around the world, vaping has spawned a fast-evolving subculture with multiple cliques and niches – a heady blend of hobbyism, gaming, punk rock, steampunk, tattoos, piercings and activism. At events such as Vape Jam, hundreds of brands compete for attention, from the small Italian company Moddog – where the designer Michele Brumazzo is selling £300 mod cases handcarved from spalting beech wood – to Imperial Tobacco’s subsidiary Blu, whose corporate stand is at Vape Jam for the first time this year, like a Toyota Prius pulling up late to a Mad Max car chase.

I started when there were few reviewers and no vape stores. Not in a million years did I think it would become my career

Global regulators and health authorities are still grappling with e-cigarettes. An alternative to smoking that looks like smoking has a complicated status when it comes to public spaces, taxation and the boardrooms of big pharma and big tobacco. Some countries have total bans on vaping; companies that manufacture smoking-cessation drugs and patches have lobbied for tighter regulation.

But as the scene has grown, YouTube and social media have spawned vape celebrities: the biggest draw pop star-sized audiences to their reviews, tutorials and fighting talk against regulation. RiP Trippers, a wired thirtysomething American with a beard, has clocked up almost 200m YouTube views and ends his videos with the slogan: “Smoking is dead, vaping is the future, the future is now.” Dimitris Agrafiotis, AKA the VapinGreek, has his own loyal following. “I started vaping in 2010 when there was just a handful of reviewers and no vape stores,” says the former restaurant owner from Tennessee, speaking to me via Skype. “Not in a million years did I think it would be like this, or become my career.”

Hope Courage at the Gorilla Vapour stand at Vape Jam. Photograph: Mikael Buck/The Guardian

Agrafiotis, who is now a full-time industry consultant and advocate, finds it hard to define a vaper. “It’s so diverse, but what you see at the shows is the hobbying side of it. I never walked up to another person who smoked [cigarettes] and said: ‘What brand is that and can I try it?’ But vaping has evolved because it’s a tech product and, as that tech has developed, the hobbyist side of it has become huge.”

The biggest hobbyists, or modders, trawl closed Facebook groups for the latest gear. Skilled engineers sell limited-edition runs of handcrafted devices to those in the know, having released prototypes to top YouTube reviewers. “To get into some of these groups you need to have two other people prepared to vouch for you,” explains John Martin. The former estates manager from Suffolk is the operations manager at Just Add Nic, an online vape store in Felixstowe. He also co-presents The Ideal Ohm Show, an irreverent weekly YouTube show (the “ohm” refers to the electrical resistance of the coil in an atomiser, a vital metric for an advanced vaper).

A few vape tricks

When a new piece of hardware is released, Martin says members of Facebook groups will join a waiting list before names are drawn in a lottery. He recalls recent fevered interest in a new RDA made by a Greek craftsman outside Athens. The Skyfall, by Esmokeguru, is precision-machined in a grade of stainless steel more commonly used to store nuclear fuel and make medical implants. The size of a plastic bottle top, it sold for £140 and only through the ESG Mods club on Facebook (4,000 members), arriving in a handmade, triangular beechwood presentation box. In Britain, Martin knows of a jeweller and a gunsmith who have switched their attention to making limited-edition vaping gear.

At Vape Jam, a gathering of what is otherwise largely an online community, the biggest buzz surrounds a counter at the Modders Gallery. “It’s for Frankenskull,” explains a Portuguese thirtysomething called Thago, who is waiting at the back of a long, slow queue. Frankenskull mods go on sale only when Paolo Curcio, an Italian metal engraver based in Spain, decides to make some. They, too, have developed a cult following and sell on the secondary market for thousands of pounds. One spot ahead of Thago in the queue, Joonas Nurmela has flown in from Spain, where he works at a vape store in Fuengirola, on the Costa del Sol. “I like special things,” he says. He owns more than 30 mods, but has long wanted a Frankenskull.

Skulls, daggers and ink feature heavily in branding; young women promote wares at events. It feels retro – and very male

Thago and Nurmela are squonkers, who are slightly different to drippers (many advanced vapers will dabble in both). Rather than dripping juice on to a coil, squonkers squeeze a bottle incorporated into the bottom of their mods, via a squonk hole, pushing the liquid directly into the atomiser. This is cleaner and easier and has grown partly in response to the tobacco products directive (TPD). This 2016 EU law limits the size of built-in vape tanks and prohibits the sale of larger juice bottles containing nicotine (advanced vapers now add nicotine “shots” to their vape juice). A squonk bottle is not classified as a tank, so it can be bigger and requires less refilling.

“You can do more customisation as well,” explains Kai, 25, a squonker from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. His friend Max has a scraggly beard and black earlobe discs the size of 10p coins; he is wearing a T-shirt of the punk band Alkaline Trio. As much as anything else, Max says a tinkering tendency unites vape connoisseurs. He has a whole dresser at home filled with mods, parts and liquids blended by Kai, a chemistry graduate.

Salvador Vazquez, 47, whose tattoos cover his shaved head and face, wears a Frankenskull mod in a leather pouch around his neck. He was a smoker in his teens and picked up an e-cigarette five years ago, when he needed a pipe to wear with a steampunk Sherlock Holmes costume. The Spanish cosplayer (cosplay being a popular costume-and-play subculture) found an elaborate e-pipe that made a big cloud. “Now it is my hobby,” he says. Vazquez is a model maker and a former professional painter for Warhammer, the fantasy battle game, but he says the biggest cultural overlap with vaping is tattoos.

Max, Kai and Matt at Vape Jam. Photograph: Mikael Buck/The Guardian

Skulls, daggers and ink feature heavily in vape branding and design. There are companies with names such as Thor, Prohibition and Vapour Freaks, which employ young women to promote their wares at events. For such a contemporary culture, it feels a little retro – and overwhelmingly male.

“Intense branding and marketing still sells at the moment,” says Agrafiotis, who has previously called out the industry for using child-friendly imagery to promote juices (vaping is illegal for under-18s). “As with any new industry, it’s maturing.”

Mainstream vaping, however – away from the unicorn-chasing of exclusive Facebook groups or the macho imagery of Vape Jam – is far more inclusive.

At Dulwich Vape, my local shop in London, I am struck by the relative diversity of customers on a Saturday afternoon; there are even women. Shops such as this have mushroomed in the past few years, particularly on high streets with lower rents; Dulwich Vape opened two years ago on a site previously occupied by a funeral director. “We do get a few people who really enjoy vaping, but it’s mostly smokers who get to 40 and think, ‘I need to quit’ and they pop in for a look,” says Stephen Duplock, 23, who sits behind the counter.

After more than quadrupling in the past six years, vaping numbers have now stalled. Peter Hajek, a professor of clinical psychology who leads the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University, London, supports vaping as a method of smoking cessation. He believes that regulation – the TPD also bans a lot of vape advertising and requires nicotine health warnings to be put on packaging – and the image of vaping as something to be controlled is putting off would-be vapers, and causing new vapers to complete the switch from cigarettes more slowly.

“I think, because we are conditioned that smoking is bad, a device with vapour that you inhale is still seen as a sort of smoking,” Hajek says. “But the risks are roughly on a par with drinking coffee.” Public Health England (PHE) said in its latest review that vaping poses “only a small fraction” of the risk of smoking and that switching completely offers big health benefits. However, the World Health Organisation has advised caution about the long-term effects. Hajek says these apparent contradictions partly explain why, according to the PHE review, only 40% of the UK’s 7.6 million smokers have tried vaping.

‘It feels a bit punk, doesn’t it?’: Rhi Kavok with Stuart Norman. Photograph: Mikael Buck/The Guardian

Regulation has galvanised the hardcore community, but could the image of vaping be putting off converts? “I think [people] might feel it’s a freaky thing,” says Hajek, who believes there should be less regulation and less “misinformation” about the safety of vaping. Vapers say the problem lies with the representation of the culture. “Vaping is literally saving lives, but society loves to poke fun at our ‘douche flutes’,” says Nick Green, a former Starbucks taster who quit caffeine for vaping (his GrimmGreen YouTube videos have more than 60m views).

The giant tobacco vape brands should be well positioned to push vaping further into the mainstream, but Hajek says they are too “far behind the curve: they are still making something that looks like a cigarette, which nobody wants”. When I approach Blu’s stand, the slickest at Vape Jam, I am led away swiftly to talk to a pair of publicists. In a conference call the following week, George Tucker, the head of communications at Imperial Tobacco, accepts that Blu will not appeal to squonkers or drippers, but he says the company’s new MyBlu device, which looks like a large memory stick, is a response to entry-level demand for less “cigalike” devices.

Rhi Kavok is among a minority of women at Vape Jam and is wavering between fags, entry-level e-cigarettes and something more advanced. The 35-year-old punk poet has come up from Brighton for the day with her friend, Stuart Norman, a keen hobbyist. Kavok had tried entry-level devices and found them unpleasant; then, on a night out last weekend, she borrowed Norman’s Asvape Michael mod. “It was amazing – I didn’t need a single cigarette the whole night,” she says, cradling the device.

She is unimpressed by the macho marketing, but not enough to feel excluded. “It just feels a bit punk, doesn’t it?” Soon she is drowned out by a DJ behind her. “It works like this, yeah!” he shouts as a crowd forms. “We’re going to have a little practice run… OK, three, two, one... inhale! And three, two, one… exhale!” A hundred vapers blow large clouds upwards. They spread and coalesce into a giant, silvery cloud, like tornadoes in reverse.

Rabone remains rare as a vaper who has never smoked. Before he turns to a customer, he offers me a go. I have never smoked, either, but I agree to try. Rabone drips some Humble Juice Co American Dream flavour on his coil. It promises a “fruity pebbles cereal treat”. I raise the mod to my lips and press the button while breathing in. As the vapour enters my lungs, I can taste Rice Krispie cakes. Then, inevitably, I cough, chasing my first cloud with all the poise of an asthmatic dragon. “Everyone does that their first time,” Rabone says. “But you get used to it.”

From dripping to squonking: know your vaper vocab

Salvador Vazquez, who travelled from Madrid to London for Vape Jam. Photograph: Mikael Buck/The Guardian

Mod

A more advanced e-cigarette than the entry-level “cigalike” or “pen” devices. Made up of multiple parts, including a tank for liquid and a rechargeable battery. A rebuildable dripping atomiser (RDA) screws on top and includes the mouthpiece and a metal coil to create the vapour. Modders modify mods.

Juice

Vape liquid, a blend of food-grade additives VG (vegetable glycerin) and PG (propylene glycol). A higher VG blend makes a bigger cloud, while more PG means more flavour. Flavourings go in with the nicotine, which can be mixed up to a maximum legal concentration of 20 milligrams per millilitre.

Cloud chasers

Vapers who perfect their mods and juices to create the biggest clouds. Trick vapers go further, spending hours on YouTube learning ways to make smoke rings and more elaborate shapes. Top chasers have appeared in several international versions of the Britain’s Got Talent TV competition.

Sub-ohming

RDAs with a low resistance (below 1 ohm) can be paired with a more powerful mod. This increases the size of the cloud, but requires a bigger inhalation, which means the nicotine level can be lower for someone who is sub-ohming to achieve the same hit.

Squonking

Squonkers squeeze a bottle incorporated into the bottom of their mods, pushing their juice into the atomiser and avoiding EU limits on the size of built-in tanks.

Dripping

Drippers use small bottles to drip juice directly on to the coil. The liquid soaks into a small piece of cotton wool threaded through the coil, where it turns to vapour during heating and inhalation. This is fiddly and messy, but it appeals to tinkering enthusiasts, many of whom build their own coils.

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