Beyoncé has become the latest celeb to light up a cigarette on stage, causing us to ask: is smoking becoming a ‘thing’ again? During her Paris performance on Sunday, the Crazy In Love singer pulled out a cigarette mid-performance and pretended to puff on the prop during her show as part of a wider ‘smoking hot’ theme where she literally lights a piano on fire.

While we are here for the dramatics, Beyoncé’s pretend-or-otherwise smoking on stage is part of a definite trend of singers smoking on stage, as well as the habit making its way back into the cultural conversation much more significantly. In a performance last year, Chappell Roan was rolled onto stage in a big red apple dressed as Lady Liberty, while smoking a large joint.

Fans were divided over Roan’s choices, with some calling it ‘disgusting’ and discussing its potential impact on younger audiences. Others, however, defended Roan and her performance, saying that it’s part of her use of drag and playful performance style. Lana Del Rey has long been famous for both smoking and vaping on stage, once stopping the show to look for her vape when she lost it. TikToker and pop singer Nessa Barrett has also been known to bring lit cigarettes on stage with her, at times just holding one and not inhaling. 

Critics posted comments such as ‘Yikes promoting cigarette smoking to your young impressionable fans? Do better,’ and another wrote ‘Smoking is bad … cmon Nessa you can do better,’ while one added ‘Why are you normalising smoking? At the end of the day it’s bad for you’.

Barrett responded to the backlash via her Instagram Story, writing, ‘U guys are so soft lmao stfu bc I don’t care’. While these women should absolutely portray themselves however they like on stage, an issue critics have – for good reason – is the increased glamourisation of smoking by huge stars. Bringing a cigarette on stage feels like a statement, and part of a trend towards the A-list picking up smoking once more.

For instance, just like Carrie Bradshaw circa Sex and the City, Sarita Choudhury’s character in the show’s reboot And Just Like That, Seema, is rarely seen without a cigarette. Dakota Johnson’s character in new film Materialists also smokes throughout, causing the New York Times to interview Jared Oviatt, who runs the Instagram @Cigfluencers, which has over 68,000 followers. He set up the account back in 2021 to document pictures of celebrities smoking. There really is an Insta account for everything.

Oviatt reported noticing an increase in pics of celebs smoking recently. ‘In the early days I was really dipping into the archives,’ he explains. ‘There weren’t a lot of new examples.’ Now, he says, ‘every week there’s at least one or two people where I’m like, “OK, that’s new.”’

He was inspired to start the account after seeing a picture of Dua Lipa smoking. ‘I was like, ‘That is so crazy that this gorgeous woman that is a household name is so openly smoking cigs on her IG grid,”’ he said, arguing that the appeal of famous people smoking is down to aesthetics. ‘That general star power makes it that much cooler,’ Oviatt explains.

Big ‘cigfluencer’ names such as Dua, Anya Taylor-Joy and Charli XCX have been papped smoking off stage and off set, adding to the normalisation of celebs (and therefore, non celebs) smoking, not to mention cigarettes making a frequent, rather unexpected appearance on the runway at London Fashion Week this year.

Pop singers are certainly opting to bring cigarettes into their performances, with Charli XCX smoking in her music videos and Lorde writing lyrics about smoking for one of her newest tracks, What Was That. The lyrics read: ‘I remember saying then, “This is the best cigarette of my life.” Well, I want you just like that.’

Anyhow, not all fans are happy about this trend. On a Reddit thread discussing Barrett’s smoking on stage, one critic wrote that her behaviour was ‘f**king gross’. ‘I don’t care if i get judged for saying this but active smokers are nasty as hell and encouraging your young audience to smoke for the aesthetic is absolutely atrocious behaviour,’ they wrote. Another accused her of ‘trying to be Lana it’s not gonna happen’.

In the age of bubblegum vapes, it’s perhaps surprising that so many female singers are feeling the attraction to cigarettes on stage. Such lyrics – and the decision to smoke on stage – sum up the euphoria many may feel from smoking, but it does also glamourise a known harmful habit if role models such as Beyoncé are either doing it or emulating doing it as part of their performances.

It’s unclear whether these starlets are actively trying to make smoking ‘cool’ again, or that they are merely using an admittedly unhealthy activity to exercise their right to act how they want on stage. There’s no smoke without fire, we guess.