What Is In Vape Juice and How Is It Made?

What Is In Vape Juice and How Is It Made?

If you're new to the vaping scene or curious to what in the world that liquid is your friends are using, you probably only have a slight familiarity with the mystery that is.... vape juice. Well, we're here to lift the fog on what juice is all about.

For you, the curious bystander, we have a 101 beginners guide on what is in vape juice and how it's made.

What is E-Juice?

Vape juice is the liquid used inside vaporizers and e-cigarettes that creates the "vapor", much different than tobacco which produces "smoke" .  This vapor is created when the vaporizer device (aka electronic cigarette) heats the juice up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and well you guessed it... vaporizes.

The e-juice can come with or without nicotine, it can also be flavorless or if you want some awesome flavor thats optional and all up to personal preference.

Now that you know a little more about what it is, it's time to take a look at whats is actually in the vapor that used in the electronic cigarette.

What is in Vape Juice?

Vape juice is at the core, a mixture of food-grade flavoring, nicotine (or none), vegetable glycerin, and propylene glycol.

Vegetable Glycerine

Often abbreviated simply as "VG" is the reason why your e-cigarette will puff out vapor in huge mass rather than a little whisp. VG gives a semi sweet taste and provides a visual effects of vapor clouds also helping to satisfy that visual sensation for smokers trying to quit. Believe it or not, because tobacco smokers who are used to seeing the "smoke" being able to actually see the vapor clouds plays a big part in helping tobacco uses quit. Partly why electronic cigarettes are much more effective than the patch or nicotine gum.

VG is used in a lot of common food products and medicines. Matter of fact, You've almost certainly consumed Vegetable Glycerin yourself not long ago in one form or another.

VG is a colorless liquid that has no smell and is really quite thick, one reason why it doesn't normally work well in atomizer tanks when used all by itself. To solve this problem, it brings us to our next ingredient.

Propylene Glycol

Mixing  propylene glycol with VG gives us a much thinner viscosity liquid. PG together with VG allows the atomizer tanks to function better and when flavor is added, it helps carry these flavor notes.

PG is an alcohol that like VG is completely odorless. It has a bit of a sweet taste but not like what you get with VG. It also gets added to food and medicine to get keep them moist.

If you're picking up vaping to make awesome cloud trick videos, you want to get a juice with more VG. PG juice doesn't make huge clouds.

Vape Flavorings

One of the biggest pulls to vaping is the delicious taste of the juice. The liquid doesn't have much of a taste on its own so specially manufactured vape flavorings are added. Not just any regular flavoring can be used in making eliquids because some food flavorings while they may be safe to eat, they are not safe to inhale. It's strange to think about but if there are any health risks with vaping, it could very well be in the flavorings or the use of food flavorings which are not intended for vaping.

So while there are some ingredients that while safe to eat, are not safe to inhale. The industry has actually done a bang-up job of picking out these harmful ingredients and eliminating them.

Make sure you get juice from a manufacturer, never just grab food flavorings from the grocery store.

Nicotine

Nicotine is what makes vaping such an effective substitute for smoking cigarettes. It allows you to satisfy your cravings without some of the tar and many other harmful ingredients from cigarettes.

While nicotine gets a really bad reputation due to its addictive qualities surprisingly  Nicotine actually not too bad. It's addictive of course and in concentrated form is not something to mess around with. However when used as intended in the electronic cigarette, its actually been associated with some health benefits and there has never been a single reported case of nicotine alone causing cancer. 

With that said, we now have all our basic ingredients to you'll find e-juice which is VG, PG, Flavoring and the optional nicotine. That leads us to our next step taking these ingredients laid out and mixing them to make the final product.

Making Your Own Juice

Before you get started with making your own vape juice you want to decide how strong you want the nicotine content to be or if you want any at all.

The formula to figure that out is going to look a little like this (Strength in mg/mL)(Volume in mL) = Amount of nicotine in mg. If you want to just make things easy on yourself, download our FREE E Juice Recipe calculator.

Adding Nicotine

Once you've decided how much you want in your juice it's time to get started. Make sure you have gloves for this part because if your working with concentrated nicotine it can be toxic if absorbed into your skin.

Using a blunt tip syringe, draw up a little more than you want into your syringe taking note at the measurements indicated on the syringe it self. Then slowly squirt your concentrated nicotine into the appropriate sized plastic drip tip bottle.

Choose Your Flavors

Once you have the nicotine in the bottle it's time to choose what flavors that you want. These can be any combination under the sun, just make sure you use flavors intended for vaping.

Generally speaking, the recommended amount of flavor you'd be best to start with is around 10 percent of your overall mixture. Remember you can always add more flavoring but if you over do it right from the get go you cant take it out and your mixtures probably going to be wasted. 

Add the Base

This is going to be your VG and PG. You can do a healthy balance of both of them, usually a 50/50 ratio is optimal but this is all preference, something you simply have to experiment with a little bit. Using a specially make vape mixing calculator is definitely recommended to assist in calculating the exact amount of each ingredient to add in order to achieve your desired result.

Prepare the Bottle

Once you have all of your ingredients together you'll screw the lid on tightly and then shake the life out of the bottle.

You will want to shake the bottle for several minutes to make sure all of your ingredients are evenly distributed.

Patience is a Virtue: Wait for it to Steep

Many liquids will taste better if you leave the cap off after shaking it to allow the mixture to sit and breath for a few days. This will give the flavors more time to blend together.

What Are You Vaping?

Vaping is a craze that is sweeping the nation due to the fun nature of the vapor, the delicious taste, and because they literally are not only changing the lives of those that use them, they have a profound effect on all those around them who benefit from the elimination of tobacco smoke. That's all for today folks, the more you know about what is in vape juice and how it's made the better your first experience will be. Happy vaping.

If you're interested in getting started with vaping, browse through our variety of great tasting juices.