American internet personality Emma Chamberlain has revealed her five-year struggle with nicotine addiction.
The 22-year-old – who rose to fame on YouTube and has since worked with the likes of Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Lancome, amassing a following of 16 million on Instagram alone – opened up about her “very severe” habit in a recent episode of her podcast, Anything Goes.
“This is a topic that I’ve avoided forever because I never wanted to have to admit to my own addiction publicly,” Chamberlain began.
“But here I am today, admitting to you that I have a very severe nicotine addiction. I have had a constant stream of nicotine in my system for the past five years. Not a day has gone by in the last five years where I haven’t consumed nicotine in some form.”
Chamberlain traced her addiction back to when she was just 15, when her “group of friends at the time all had vapes”.
While she wasn’t compelled to join in because of a “really strong conscience, and such a strong sense of guilt” around substance use, when she moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles at 17, vaping became a form of comfort.
“Fast forward two years, I’m living in Los Angeles, I’m now in the public eye, my life has changed a lot. I have a completely new group of people around me, and a lot of the people around me were using vapes and smoking cigarettes,” she explained.
The “guilty conscience” she’d once had around the habit also disappeared as a result of her struggle with depression.
“I just sort of became more careless about what I did to myself, after struggling with depression … It was all downhill from there.”
The star admitted that, in hindsight, vaping was a “tangible” way to comfort herself during her quick ascent to fame.
“When I reflect on the first few years of my addiction, I see why it happened,” Chamberlain said.
“I got addicted around the time when I became a public figure. This is not a coincidence. I moved to LA at around 17. I was ready to do that, but I also wasn’t. Like, there’s no way to be ready for that.
“You feel unsettled when you first move out. You feel like the whole world is your oyster and, in a way, that’s really exciting and, in a way, that’s really frightening – because you’re so used to your tiny little world in your hometown … It’s overwhelming.”
While a “little boost of nicotine” also helped her to stay “focused and motivated” when she’d spend “all day” editing her YouTube videos, soon Chamberlain couldn’t go more than “a few hours” without needing to vape.
“I would immediately become emotional, irritable, and just obsessed with figuring out how I [could] find nicotine in some form.”
Chamberlain’s struggle is one that no doubt resonates with her largely Gen Z audience.
A survey published earlier this year in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health found almost half of respondents aged 15 to 30 were either current (14 per cent) or past (33 per cent) e-cigarette users. For those who vaped at least monthly, 61 per cent said it was because “a friend used” the devices as well.
The Federal Government confirmed in May it would dedicate $63 million to a public health campaign aimed at discouraging young people from vaping and smoking. It also cracked down on the sale of vapes across the country, essentially restricting the sale of e-cigarettes without a prescription.
While Chamberlain hasn’t managed to shake the habit entirely yet, she’s now been trying to quit for several weeks.
“I started to panic constantly about what it was doing to my body,” she said, “and that anxiety became so overwhelming for me one day that I just decided that I have to quit.”