There is speculation that the new, healthier alternative for the bad habit of smoking is E-cigs. Well sorry to hit the buzzer on you, but who ever told you that probably doesn’t know how similar e-cigs and regular cigarettes really are.

I personally found out about e-cigs when a close friend and I used to work for a vape store in San Diego. The e-cig originally came out in 2003, but it took a couple years for them to become big. You may have heard of e-cigs by their common name: the “vape pen.” It’s what people use in Instagram photos and Vine videos when they’re performing all those crazy smoke tricks.

For a very long time I was pro e-cig as the next step to be able to quit smoking. I even owned one myself. One night, all of my friends and I were celebrating a birthday, when someone was made fun of because he was using an e-cig.

“You might as well smoke a real cigarette dude,” my friend Ryan told him.

We all disapproved of Ryan’s comment. Even I was confused by it.

Thanks to my nosey personality, I did my research and compared the ingredients of a e-cig to a real cigarette.

“People think that since it doesn’t have tabacco that it is super healthy and the safer alternative, said Crystal Nguyen, who lives in Los Angeles. “But it is not. What people do not know is that just like a cigarette it contains nicotine and much more harmful chemicals that can make the user become just as addict[ed] just like if it were a real cigarette.”

I was mind-blown when I first heard this. Once I found that out, I haven’t wasted my money to go out and buy an e-cig (a decent quality e-cig is an easy $50.00 or more).

Now doesn’t buying yourself some new shoes, video games or makeup sounds much more nice than one boring old e-cig?