What Nicotine Salts Actually Are and Why They Took Over UK Vaping

What Nicotine Salts Actually Are and Why They Took Over UK Vaping

There's a product sitting on the shelves of nearly every online vape retailer in Britain right now that most people outside the industry have never heard of. Nicotine salts. Not a new brand. Not a new flavour. A different form of nicotine altogether. And it quietly became the backbone of the entire UK e-liquid market without most consumers knowing the chemistry behind what they were buying.

The Chemistry Is Simple Enough

Traditional e-liquids use freebase nicotine. That's nicotine in its purest chemical form, extracted from tobacco and added to a base of vegetable glycerine and propylene glycol. It works fine at low concentrations. At higher concentrations, it gets harsh. Really harsh. The throat hit at 18mg or 20mg freebase nicotine makes most people cough.

Nicotine salts solve that problem. They use the same nicotine but bonded with a mild acid, usually benzoic acid. That changes the pH level and makes high-strength nicotine feel smooth instead of aggressive. You can vape 20mg of nicotine salt and barely feel it on your throat. Same amount of nicotine, completely different experience.

That single difference explains almost everything about why the UK vaping market looks the way it does right now.

Disposables Ran on Nic Salts

Every disposable vape sold in the UK between 2021 and the June 2025 ban used nicotine salt e-liquid. Every single one. Elf Bar, Lost Mary, SKE Crystal, Elux. All of them. The reason is straightforward. Disposables needed to deliver satisfying nicotine in a tiny amount of liquid. A 2ml pod at 20mg freebase would be unpleasant to inhale. At 20mg of nic salt, it feels smooth.

Most disposable users never knew this. They just knew the vape felt good and the nicotine hit was quick. That was nic salts doing the work in the background. Millions of UK consumers developed a preference for a type of nicotine delivery without knowing the technical name for it.

When the disposable ban landed, those millions of people didn't suddenly want a different nicotine experience. They wanted the same feeling in a different format. That's what drove the explosion in bottled nic salt e-liquid sales through the second half of 2025.

The Bottled Market Grew Fast

Before the ban, bottled nic salt e-liquids were a steady but unremarkable part of UK vape retail. Enthusiast vapers bought them. People with refillable kits used them. The market existed, but it wasn't growing dramatically.

After June 2025, demand jumped. Former disposable users switching to refillable pod kits needed liquid to fill them with. They gravitated towards nic salts because that's what their taste buds were trained on. The smooth, high-strength experience they were used to from disposables only existed in nic salt format.

Brands that had already built their e-liquid ranges around nic salts were ready. Elfliq had the Elf Bar flavour library in bottled form. Maryliq covered the Lost Mary range. Elux Liquid offered the same profiles. The transition for consumers was as close to painless as it could be. Same flavours, same nicotine type, different container.

Why Freebase Didn't Capture These Customers

This is where it gets interesting from a consumer behaviour perspective. Freebase nicotine e-liquids have been available in the UK for over a decade. They're cheaper to produce. They come in a wider range of nicotine strengths, including 0mg, 3mg, 6mg, 12mg, and 18mg. They work in every type of vape hardware.

But former disposable users didn't switch to freebase. The experience was too different. Lower strength freebase at 3mg or 6mg didn't satisfy their nicotine craving. Higher strength freebase at 18mg was too rough on the throat. Nic salts at 10mg or 20mg hit the sweet spot. Strong enough to satisfy, smooth enough to enjoy.

As SmileToTalk has explored in its coverage of personalised technology and consumer habits, people develop specific preferences through repeated use and then resist switching to alternatives that feel different. Vaping is no exception. Once your body and brain associate a particular sensation with satisfaction, anything else feels wrong. Nic salts created that association for millions of UK vapers through disposables, and now those preferences are locked in.

The Economics Favour Nic Salts Too

A 10ml bottle of nic salt e-liquid costs between £3 and £5 at most UK online retailers. That same bottle replaces roughly five disposable vapes at pre-ban pricing. The value equation is obvious, and it's one of the main reasons former disposable users stayed with vaping rather than drifting back to cigarettes after the ban.

There's a cost pressure coming through. From October 2026, all e-liquids sold in the UK face an excise duty of £2.20 per 10ml. That'll push a £3.99 bottle closer to £6. Nic salts will still be cheaper than the equivalent in prefilled pods or what disposables used to cost, but the gap narrows. Multi-buy deals and online bundle pricing will matter more than ever for retailers trying to keep customers buying.

As SmileToTalk has covered in its practical workplace guides, avoiding predictable mistakes is often more valuable than chasing the next big opportunity. For nic salt brands, the predictable mistake would be treating the post-ban demand surge as permanent without adjusting for the tax impact. The smart ones are already building loyalty programmes and subscription models to lock in customers before October 2026 changes the maths.

Where This Goes Next

Nic salts aren't going anywhere. The format is too well matched to what UK consumers want. High strength, smooth delivery, compact hardware. The brands are established, the supply chains are in place, and the customer base is growing rather than shrinking.

What will change is how people buy them. Online retail already dominates nic salt sales because the product range is too wide for most physical shops to carry. Thirty brands, each with twenty or more flavours, in multiple nicotine strengths. That's a catalogue problem that only works on a website.

The incoming tax will push more consumers towards bulk buying and subscription services. Monthly deliveries of your preferred nic salt flavours at a locked-in price. That model is already common in coffee, pet food, and razor blades. Vaping is next in line.

Nicotine salts were the invisible technology inside disposable vapes. Now they're the visible product driving the post-ban market. Most UK vapers still couldn't explain the chemistry. They don't need to. They just know what feels right when they inhale.