Nothing spoils a vaping experience like having the wrong juice. While flavour is subjective -- one person's favourite is vile to someone else -- there are definite do's and don'ts when it comes to choosing e-liquid.
E-juice comes in thousands of flavours, ranging from varieties of tobacco (often favoured by people who are quitting smoking) to fruit, menthol, candy, and dessert flavours. But choosing the right flavour is only part of it. Here are the keys to picking the right juice for you.
Nicotine strength
Let's start with what most people care most about -- nicotine strength.
At The Juice Warehouse, we do our own proprietary range of e-liquids in 10ml bottles. They, like many premixed juices, come in strengths of 3 mg, 6 mg, 12 mg, and 18 mg. You can also hear these strengths expressed as 0.3, 0.6, 1.2, and 1.8 -- these are percentages, so 1.8 e-juice is 1.8 percent nicotine, and so on.
The vast majority of my new customers don't know which strength will work for them, so this is what I tell them -- 0.3 is for people on the verge of giving up nicotine entirely; 0.6 is for people who used to smoke up to 10 cigarettes daily, 1.2 is for people who used to smoke up to a pack a day, and 1.8 is for people who used to smoke quite heavily. There is a bit more to it than that, which I'll go into later, but that's a good rule of thumb.
Juice with 1.8 percent nicotine will often taste, to some people, slightly different from the exact same flavour at a lower nicotine strength. So I never recommend 1.8 strength e-juice to anyone who wasn't a heavy smoker before they took up vaping.
Also, if you have an e-cigarette that produces big clouds of vapour, you probably won't need as much nicotine. That massive cloud is going into your lungs first, after all. Inhaling two lungs full of high-nicotine e-juice can make you feel swimmy or even sick! If you're vaping at a wattage of 60 or upwards, I would recommend starting at 0.3 percent nicotine and seeing how you get on with that first.
An increasingly popular e-juice option is nicotine salts. Click here for more information about nic salts!
Vaping style
If you smoke or used to smoke, imagine taking a puff. Do you pull smoke into your mouth and then take a clean breath to bring it into your lungs? Or do you draw it straight into your lungs on one breath?
It might not seem to make much of a difference, but when you vape, it's a rather important consideration. The first style of smoking or vaping is called mouth-to-lung (MTL), while the second is called direct-to-lung (DTL). And there are are e-liquids better suited to each style.
I'll get into juice thickness in the last section of this article, but for now, suffice it to say that thicker juices are better suited to DTL vaping, whereas thinner juices are better for MTL. This is because thinner juices vaporise faster and hit the back of your throat harder, making it less pleasant to inhale them directly. Thicker juices turn into smoother vapour that's easier to inhale a lot of, meaning you don't need as much nicotine in them.
Or to put it another way, if your vaping style is MTL, you'll probably want a higher nicotine strength and a thinner liquid, because if you're on a weak strength liquid with a light throat hit, taking a "chaser" breath after you inhale vapour will likely result in a less-than-satisfactory experience.
Juice composition
Every e-liquid out there is composed of flavourings dissolved into a combination of propylene glycol (PG) and vegetable glycerin (VG). This is what people mean when they talk about "50-50" or "70-30" mixes, by the way.
VG is thicker than PG and only vaporises properly at higher temperatures; thus, e-juices with a high percentage of VG tend to create bigger, denser clouds.
Coils designed for vaping below 60 watts normally don't handle high VG liquids as well as more high-powered mods do. On the flip side, liquids with a higher percentage of PG work well in lower-powered vapes, delivering a nice throat hit and vaporising properly.
Check your vape and see what your wattage range is before choosing a high VG (like 70-30 or 80-20) or high PG (like a 50-50) juice. Also note that high VG liquids typically don't need as much nicotine, because it's easier to take a bigger hit of these e-juices.
Conclusion
After you've found a good flavour, which I'll be writing about more in the future, there's a basic rule of thumb you can follow to select the right e-juice:
If you favour big clouds, your vaping style is more DTL, and you have a high-powered vape, go for a juice with low nicotine and high VG. If you don't care about clouds, your vaping style is closer to MTL, and you have a lower-powered mod, go for a liquid higher in both nicotine and PG.
Stephen “Tex” English: tex@thejuicewarehouse.co.uk; Insta: @tex_vapes
