Dripping is awesome. A little more hands-on and hard work than vaping with a tank, I’ll admit, but the flavour and clouds of vapour are hard to beat even with a sub ohm tank. But if you’ve been reading the news over the last few weeks, you’ve probably heard another side to the story. According to various articles, dripping is a new “fad” among teens, with about a quarter of teens who’ve vaped saying that they’ve tried it.

Turn that over in your mind for a moment. One in four teens who’ve tried vaping have supposedly dripped. This is a practice that requires you to own a purpose-built atomizer, a spool of resistance wire, wicking material and several tools, not to mention having the ability to actually wrap and connect the coil. If you think it’s a little fishy that a quarter of teens who’ ve ever vaped – including those just experimenting – have actually gone to all this effort, you’re right to be suspicious.

The finding may come from a peer-reviewed study, but as most vapers have learned by now, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reliable. In fact, as a comment from Professor Riccardo Polosa and PhD candidate Amelia Ruby Howard points out, the headline claim that a quarter of teens who’ve vaped have tried dripping is very unlikely to be true.

Why?

Because researchers have such a poor grasp of what dripping is they can’t put together an easily-understandable question about it. The study this all comes from is really quite straightforward. In 2015, researchers gave surveys to over 7,000 students from high schools in Connecticut about their tobacco use, as well as their vaping habits. They asked about past vaping, whether the students had tried dripping and if so, why they tried it.

In total, just less than 1,900 had tried vaping, but a lot of the students’ answers to the questions about dripping didn’t make sense. After removing close to 800 students for either being inconsistent or just not answering the dripping questions, there were about 1,100 students left. Out of these students, 26.1 % said they’d tried dripping. They said they did it because it produces thicker clouds (63.5 % of the drippers), that the flavour is better (38.7 %), that the throat hit is stronger (27.7 %) and out of curiosity (21.6 %). In the introduction to the paper and its discussion section, the authors also claim that dripping makes your e-cig put out more formaldehyde and similar chemicals. This claim is based on another study looking at dripping.

The media storm that resulted from this study was quite surreal to read as a vaper. Not only did they do everything they could to make “dripping” sound like a form of drug abuse, almost every piece of coverage did a monumentally awful job of explaining what dripping actually is. Most journalists’ explanations relied on how the researchers described it. Unfortunately, the researchers made it seem like dripping is applying e-liquid directly onto the hot coils of your e-cig and then huffing whatever fumes it gives off.

So as a public service to any journalists or researchers reading, here is what dripping really is.

E-cigarette tanks have two main parts: the tank section (which holds the e-liquid) and an “atomizer head.” This atomizer head holds a coil and some “wick” material (usually cotton). The wick soaks up the e-liquid before it is vaporized by the coil. When you vaporize the e-liquid in the wick, the tank resupplies the wick with more liquid so you can continue vaping without getting a “dry hit.” Dry hits are just what they sounds like: vaping without enough liquid in the wick. It makes your coil run hot and gives the vapour an unpleasant burnt taste.