Mango is not, by any reasonable metric, a controversial or exotic flavor. It appears in smoothies, yoghurts, sorbets, and fruit salads at even the most unambitious hotel breakfast buffets. Once considered decadent, children now eat mango slices from plastic lunchboxes, and airlines offer mango juice to economy passengers. 

While delicious, many would agree that the flavor is ubiquitous and entirely unremarkable when compared with other tropical fruits. Except, as British vapers will attest, when it is inhaled through a vape. Mango is one of the most popular vape flavors available across the pond, with products like triple mango vape juice leading the charge.

In the United States, mango became something else entirely. When Juul launched its Mango pods, they were marketed as a tool to help adult smokers quit cigarettes. They were popular, and what’s more, they worked. But then, when youth vaping rates spiked, and the political winds shifted, fruit-flavored vape products were considered politically toxic. Indeed, by late 2019, Juul had pulled the flavor from American shelves – not because of what it contained, but because of what it had come to represent.

Meanwhile, in Britain, fruit vapes continued to sit on the shelf, without the unfair perception that flavor alone determines intent, age, or risk. As a result, the same flavor became either a quitting aid or a political symbol, depending on which side of the Atlantic it was sold.

The Case Against Fruit-Flavored Vapes

The American case against flavored vapes was built on a simple, emotionally intuitive narrative: fruit and candy flavors exist solely to hook teenagers. The story was politically effective. It was easy to tell. It was also, at best, incomplete.

Research has consistently complicated the picture. A 2020 Penn State study found that adult vapers — not teenagers, but grown adults who had quit smoking — also preferred sweet flavors. In fact, the preference for fruit and dessert options increased over time, while interest in tobacco flavors declined. 

This makes a certain intuitive sense. Many ex-smokers credit appealing flavors with helping them stay switched. A tobacco-flavored vape, for some, sits uncomfortably close to the thing they are trying to escape. After all, the point of quitting is not to be reminded of cigarettes with every inhale.

But nuance does not make for effective policy messaging, does it? The narrative that sweetness equals youth appeal proved stickier than the data suggesting adults rely on those same flavors to stay off cigarettes. The truth is that fruit-flavored vapes were not designed to recruit teenagers – they were simply designed for people who did not want to taste an ashtray anymore. 

That distinction got lost somewhere in the press releases.

What Britain Did Differently

The United Kingdom looked at the same flavors and reached a different conclusion. Rather than restrict what adults could buy, British regulators focused on how products were marketed, sold, and who could access them. The logic was harm-reduction-first: any adult smoker switching to vaping – even with an exotic fruit blend – represented a public health win.

UK retailers continue to stock flavors like triple mango vape juice without legal barriers, a product category that has been effectively legislated out of existence in much of America. The predicted catastrophe never arrived. British youth vaping rates remain lower than in the US. And as of 2024, the UK has more adult vapers than smokers for the first time – a milestone that the US shows no signs of reaching anytime soon.

Of course, none of this proves that flavor bans are wrong per se. But it suggests the relationship between flavor access and youth uptake is more complicated than the American narrative allowed. Eliminating mango did not eliminate the problem, but it may have eliminated one of the tools that helped adults stop smoking.

Flavor Bans Do Not Eliminate Demand

A revealing Yale study predicted that prohibiting flavored vapes would achieve nothing more than push smokers back to cigarettes. Surveys of adult vapers found that roughly half would seek black-market alternatives or DIY additives if their preferred flavors disappeared. Some said they would simply return to smoking. 

There is a certain irony here. The same regulatory energy that removed mango from American vape shops has done nothing to remove cigarettes from American gas stations. The product that kills half its long-term users remains freely available in every convenience store, while the product that helps people stop using it has been stripped of the flavors that made it tolerable.

The Real Divide

The divide is not really about fruit-flavored products. It never really was. It is about how policy narratives determine outcomes, and how political comfort can diverge from public health clarity.

In the United States, flavor became a proxy for youth danger, and the response was total elimination. In the United Kingdom, flavor was understood as part of the harm-reduction toolkit, and the response was regulation without prohibition. While neither approach is perfect, one country now counts more vapers than smokers, and the other is still debating whether adults can be trusted with fruit.

Ultimately, flavor bans often reveal more about what politicians find defensible than what evidence finds effective. The mango, as it turns out, was never really the point.