There is a vape company in Florida that once sold an e-liquid called Skeetlez. You can probably guess what it was supposed to taste like. Wrigley, the candy company, guessed too. The inevitable lawsuit arrived quickly. The name was changed, but thankfully, the product survived. But the episode illustrates something far larger and considerably less amusing than a small manufacturer getting spanked for trademark infringement: the word flavour, when attached to vaping, has become genuinely dangerous to say out loud. Not dangerous in the public health sense, you understand, but dangerous in the commercial, legal, and digital sense. Across the United States, a strange coalition of candy conglomerates, advertising platforms, app stores, and federal regulators has converged on the same conclusion, namely that the language used to describe what a vape product tastes like is, in itself, a problem that requires suppression.
The Trademark Squeeze
The Wrigley lawsuit was certainly not an isolated incident. The same company had already sued another e-liquid maker for products called Dbl Mint and Joosey Fruit. The legal argument was straightforward trademark protection and was entirely valid. You cannot sell a product that trades on the name of someone else’s candy. But the consequence extends beyond a few careless manufacturers. The message received by the broader industry was that flavour names must avoid even the faintest association with existing food brands. What sounds like reasonable intellectual property enforcement has, in practice, created an environment where describing a vape liquid in appetising terms feels like a legal liability. The flavour itself is not the problem – it’s the description of the flavour that seems to be causing the drama. Manufacturers now navigate a naming landscape where the obvious word for what something tastes like may belong to someone else, and even a creative approximation might attract legal attention. The result is a category increasingly forced to speak in code about its own products.
The Platform Blackout
If trademark law narrowed the vocabulary, advertising platforms eliminated it. Google bans all ads for tobacco products and anything designed to simulate smoking. Meta prohibits the promotion of vapes, e-cigarettes, vaporisers, and (in a detail that deserves particular attention) even nicotine-free wellness vapes that contain no tobacco whatsoever. The policy extends to heated tobacco, nicotine pouches, rolling papers, and any content that depicts tobacco use in a positive light. Apple went even further. In 2019, it removed all 181 vaping-related apps from the App Store, including companion apps that simply allowed users to adjust the temperature on their device. The App Store guidelines now state that apps encouraging the consumption of vape products are not permitted. Not apps that sell vape products, as that was already banned, but apps that encourage their use, a distinction that is probably broad enough to swallow almost anything. The practical effect is this: a legitimate, legal vaping business in the United States cannot advertise on Google, cannot run ads on Facebook or Instagram, cannot build an app for Apple devices, and must exercise extreme caution even when describing its own products on its own website, because search visibility depends on the same platforms that have decided the category should not be visible. Some nicotine-free vape companies have, rather amusingly, resorted to marketing their products as personal aromatherapy diffusers to get past Meta’s automated filters. That is not a joke, by the way – that is the actual workaround.
The Public Health Side Effect
But this is where the language problem becomes a legitimate health problem. The platforms have not banned cigarette brands from existing online. Marlboro has a website, after all, and Philip Morris has a corporate presence on every major platform. The tobacco industry’s century of brand recognition remains searchable, findable, and wholly undisturbed. What has been suppressed is the language of the alternative. The adult smoker searching for information about switching to vaping will find the platforms less helpful than they once were, because the vocabulary required to describe what vaping offers (flavours, options, product comparisons) has been algorithmically flagged as suspect. Ultimately, the information exists, but has been made harder to find by companies that have no public health mandate and face no accountability for the consequences of their content policies. Governments regulate notoriously slowly, with hearings and comment periods. Platforms regulate at lightning speed, with an overnight policy update and an algorithm change. Either way, the effect on the legal industry can be identical, but only one of them involves a vote.
The British Shelf
In the United Kingdom, vape flavours are described plainly on retail websites, advertised within clear regulatory boundaries, and purchased by adults without linguistic contortion. Strawberry, in other words, is rightfully called strawberry. In America, strawberry has become a word that triggers lawsuits, flags algorithms, and invites regulatory scrutiny. Meanwhile, 480,000 Americans will die from cigarettes this year, and nobody has yet sued Marlboro for making tobacco appealing.
