A New Symbol, Renewed Hope for World Vape Day
15th Annual World Vape Day - May 30, 2026
In 2012, people in 15 countries observed the first World Vaping Day. Every year since, it has been a celebration for people who have found a way to stop smoking by switching to a safer alternative. This year, on the 15th World Vape Day, the tobacco harm reduction (THR) movement has something it has never had before: a universal symbol of its own.
The symbol did not come from a corporation, government agency, public health organization, or marketing firm trying to define us from the outside. It came from us, the people who use nicotine.
We formed an international committee composed entirely of people who practice THR, with the goal of designing a symbol that advocates worldwide could use. We considered seven possible designs and then asked people with lived experience to vote on which one best represented the THR community.
That process is important. For too long, people who use nicotine have been spoken about, studied, regulated, criminalized and stigmatized. Too often, we are invited into public conversations only as statistics, case studies, or moral outrage about our “addiction.” In some of the most powerful global tobacco policy spaces, people with lived experience are still treated as people to be controlled, not people to be heard.
The THR movement was built by people who listened to one another. Most of us did not find tobacco harm reduction through an institution. We found it through each other: a friend, a family member, someone in a vape shop, or a stranger on forums or social media.
Someone shared what had worked for them. Vaping or another safer option helped them leave cigarettes behind, and they wanted other people to know there was another way. That is how this movement grew: person to person, story by story, across countries and languages, carried by people who knew what it felt like to believe they would never quit smoking and then finally did. Those connections gave birth to a community filled with hope.
That is the story behind this symbol.
The design is simple: five curved human forms moving around a shared center, like people in motion around a common purpose. The image suggests connection, protection and momentum. It looks like people gathered together, arms around one another, holding a shared space open.
During the planning process, one person said it looked like “a collective hug that never stops.” We can’t think of a better way to express how we feel about our community.
Nicotine use is often discussed in the coldest possible language: prevalence, regulation, toxicant exposure, initiation, cessation, abstinence, enforcement and compliance. Those things are clinical and policy-oriented, but they are not the whole story.
The whole story includes people who smoked for decades and tried to quit more times than they can count; people who lost parents, spouses, siblings, or friends to smoking; and people who wanted a better chance at more time with the people they love.
The five human forms can be read in more than one way. They represent five principles: respect for the person, commitment to evidence, harm reduction, prioritizing autonomy and sociocultural sensitivity. Together, they form a community.
Those principles are not abstract to us. Many of us know what happens when people see the product or the behavior before they see the human being, so respect for the person had to come first. We wanted the symbol grounded in evidence, including the basic truth that smoking is deadly primarily because of combustion. We featured harm reduction and autonomy because people deserve truthful information about options that do not require nicotine abstinence. And because THR looks different from place to place, the symbol also had to leave room for local communities, cultures, beliefs, traditions, laws, product availability, and the different ways people who use nicotine are treated where they live.
The five human forms can also stand for people from the world’s five regions—Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America—reaching toward one another across borders. The symbol is not tied to one country, language, product category, reason for use, or type of government. It represents a global community connected by a shared belief that we deserve truthful information, safer choices and a voice in the policies that affect us.
That is why we chose a symbol that is not tied to one color. It is recognizable in any color, allowing communities to adapt colors for their own campaigns and purposes. Some of us also saw a resemblance to a frangipani flower, associated with new life, renewal and strength in the face of difficult challenges. That was not the original intent, but the connection felt fitting. Those are exactly the kinds of things many of us found through THR and the community that has formed around it.
The new World Vape Day logo shows the symbol’s flexibility in action. It places the THR symbol over five overlapping colored circles. The circles enhance the flower-like shape, while their Venn-diagram overlap suggests something essential to public health: the best outcomes come when evidence and lived experience are allowed to meet. The colors also remind us that this is a global movement made up of people from many places, backgrounds and perspectives.
World Vape Day began as a celebration. Over time, it also became a day of advocacy, resistance and survival. We have used it to push back against misinformation, stigma, bans (and their unintended consequences), punitive taxes and policies that make cigarettes easier to obtain than safer alternatives.
When reflecting on the history of this event and of the products we use, the progression becomes clear. We have spent years wading through a tumultuous public health landscape, working tirelessly to correct bad science and manufactured panics.
But the underlying issue in this debate remains a profound lack of balance. Lawmakers and public health agencies focus myopically on youth initiation, treating it as the sole metric of success while utterly ignoring the millions of adults who are still actively dying from smoking combustible tobacco. Our new symbol represents a shift from defensive response to self-definition. We are no longer just fighting regulators’ hyper-fixations; we are actively naming who we are.
Misinformation, stigma, and restrictive policies are not going away. But neither are we. Across cultures and product categories, people with lived experience will continue to find each other, share what saved their lives, and work tirelessly to keep the door open for those who still smoke.
A symbol cannot replace the need for accurate data and humane policy providing access to safer options. But it can make our resistance visible. It gives the global community a shared banner to recognize the movement and the human rights values driving it forward.
That is tobacco harm reduction at its best: a collective hug showing how we support each other while reminding society that nothing about us should happen without us.
Until next time…
Notes:
I create these newsletters as a personal project. They are not affiliated with any current or past employers or groups with which I volunteer. I receive no financial compensation for my efforts to create these newsletters. Thank you to those who have offered to fund this project and compensate me for my time and effort. This is my gift to those interested in nicotine. Community service is important to me. Volunteering is something I have done since I was a child.