Key Points
· Overseas e-cigarette brands are ramping up women-focused design—from perfume-bottle shells and heart-shaped screens to necklace-style and lanyard-ready forms—turning devices into wearable accessories.
· At InterTabac 2025, 2Firsts observed several exhibitors highlighting “women-friendly” as a core value proposition.
· Many women-targeted products are priced in the mid-to-high range, reflecting a “pink tax” premium driven more by design and aesthetics than by technical specifications.
· Brands are leveraging fashion and identity narratives to enter beauty and social consumption contexts, pushing e-cigarettes toward “digital accessory” status.
· Experts recommend a three-step approach for women-focused e-cigs—product differentiation → women-specific product lines → dedicated branding—while cautioning against two common pitfalls: superficial attention-seeking and gimmicky features.
2Firsts, October 20, 2025 —In recent years, women-oriented design has emerged as a strategic frontier for e-cigarette brands. On overseas e-commerce platforms and social media, an increasing number of products marketed as “for women” or “women-friendly” have surfaced. These are labeled “FOR HER” and feature perfume-bottle silhouettes, heart-shaped color displays, pearl chains, or lanyard slots—appearing more like wearable fashion accessories than vaping devices.
This shift in design language isn’t merely an aesthetic whim. It signals the industry’s attempt to replicate the women’s marketing playbook long used by traditional tobacco and other sectors—“softening” hardware forms while embedding symbols of elegance, confidence, and independence, thereby redrawing consumption boundaries.
Women-Focused Design Competition: Visual Strategies in E-Cigarette Branding
On Puffmi’s official site, Flora sits under a “For Ladies” tab. The page copy centers on “Your Elegance On Display.”
Visually, Flora uses a perfume-bottle-like shape with a pearl chain as decoration, reading more like a “styling piece” than an electronic device. It sells for about US$20, a mid-to-high price in its class.
Another model, Luffbar Doris 30K, grabs attention with a heart-shaped body and heart screen, includes a lanyard slot, and comes in multiple fruit flavors. It retails at US$24.99 on U.S. platforms.
A similar design logic was on full display at InterTabac 2025 in September. 2Firsts observed many brands strengthening women-focused expressions. HAYATI’s new Hayati Liora drew eyes with a “light, refined” chassis and “fashion color matching,” promoted via beauty-themed Instagram campaigns.
PUFFEEL rolled out two pink, rhinestone-studded devices, touting “WORLD’S FIRST DIAMOND VAPE FOR HER” and explicitly targeting women.
The trend isn’t limited to e-cigs. In nicotine pouches, “refined” design is also emerging.
KELLY WHITE launched a series designed for women, with soft color palettes and leather-textured cases, leaning toward beauty and lifestyle branding and highlighting the symbols of “refinement and elegance.”
Together, these examples outline a clear direction: manufacturers are deliberately binding aesthetics to “accessorization,” shifting e-cigs from neutral hardware to “digital accessories” that fit women’s styling contexts.
Market Reviews: Looks and Flavors as New Battlegrounds
User comments from Russian and U.S. retail platforms show reviews on women-focused e-cigs clustering around appearance and flavor.
On Russia’s iRecommend, users praise Flora’s “refined colors” and wearable decorative beads, saying it looks more like jewelry than an e-cig. Similar sentiments appear across multiple reviews, underscoring appearance as a key draw.
On U.S. platform Element Vape, some LUFFBAR DORIS 30K reviews read: “So cute and great flavors” and “Pretty to look at, and great taste.” This reviews captures consumer recognition of both “looks” and “flavor.”
On Instagram, Hayati Liora also received notes like “Nice product POD innovation,” though overall discussion volume remains modest.
Public review samples remain limited and skew negative comments are relatively scarce. Some industry watchers suggest this may reflect the early-stage market and niche retail channels—with limited exposure, evaluations tend to cluster as positive.
Even so, these snippets suggest women-focused marketing wins most visibly at the level of visual identity.
The Continuity of Women’s Tobacco Marketing: Hardware-Encoding Female Expression
In the latter half of the 20th century, traditional cigarette brands developed a fixed pattern for women’s marketing—slimmer sticks, sleeker packs, and narratives tied to independence, fashion, and liberation.
In 1968, PMI launched Virginia Slims with the slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby,” binding smoking to women’s independence—a textbook case of emotional marketing via “women’s empowerment.” The slogan condensed 1960s liberation into a congratulatory call, using the second-person “you” to pull audiences into a progress narrative, implying “smoking this = continuing to embrace independence and modernity.” In effect, it translated social value into a purchasable identity symbol.
Today’s women-focused e-cigs hardware-encode that visual vocabulary—heart screens, chains, lanyards make the device a wearable vehicle of expression; fruit and dessert flavors reinforce a light, gentle sensibility. By integrating appearance, flavors, and accessories, transforming vaping into a lifestyle item with aesthetic and social dimensions.
Unlike traditional cigarettes, e-cig makers embed “women-focused” cues directly into the device—the hardware is both medium and symbol. In this way, products sell not just nicotine, but also identity and emotion.
The “Pink Tax” Logic: Market Premiums and Brand Strategy in Women-Focused E-Cigs
Commercially, women-focused products often carry higher price tags—a sociological phenomenon known as the Pink Tax, where goods/services for women cost more at equivalent functionality.
In e-cigs and nicotine-replacement markets, this is reappearing in new guises. Women-positioned e-cigs tend to sit mid-to-high in price bands, while KELLY WHITE nicotine pouches are priced at £22/box, nearly 3–4× BAT’s VELO (~£5–6/box).
This gap doesn’t stem solely from technology; it’s driven more by design, tone, and narrative value: soft palettes, pearl chains, heart screens, leather packaging—details that heighten giftability and lifestyle qualities, expanding pricing headroom.
From an industry view, this aesthetic premium is a differentiation strategy: reshaping price anchors through emotional and aesthetic storytelling, shifting the product from a simple nicotine carrier to a good that fuses aesthetics, sociality, and identity expression.
For brands, “women-focused” is not just a tweak in looks—it redefines market segmentation and pricing systems. The next phase of innovation hinges on meeting diverse needs without sliding into surface-level gender labeling.
Expert Analysis: The Three-Layer Logic of Women’s Marketing
Gao Yang, PhD in Advertising at Communication University of China and Director of the Center for International Communication of Chinese Brands in South and Southeast Asia at Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, told 2Firsts that women-focused marketing in e-cigs can be divided into three layers:
- Establish differentiated product features, using appearance and color to embody feminine qualities;
- Build vertical product series targeting women’s needs;
- Construct segmented, dedicated brand positioning—an inevitable outcome of market evolution.
Gao believes women’s consumption psychology is driven mainly by “self-pleasing” and “expression.” The former emphasizes the fusion of beauty and experience; the latter showcases personality and taste, integrating into modern women’s daily accessories and symbolic systems.
He also cautions against over-pursuing eye-catching looks or show-off functions, which can shorten product lifecycles. Overall, a systematic approach—from function and product lines to brand positioning—will be essential for the industry’s segmented growth.
Cover image generated by ChatGPT
