What are Nicotine Salts?
Nicotine salt is a type of nicotine that is naturally present in tobacco leaf. This salt is much stable when compared to the traditional freebase nicotine salt present in e-liquids. In general, this salt needs much time to undergo a complete vaporization process and hence, it will not easily travel to the nicotine receptors in your body. Thus, nicotine salts are not the easiest way to spread nicotine all over your body.
Nicotine salt becomes popular due to the invention of a device called the JUUL, and there has been more demand for this product over the market. But now nicotine salts are available readily in the market due to which popularity increases still more.
Nicotine Vs Nicotine Salt:
Nicotine is also known as freebase nicotine salt, which is extracted from the leaf tobacco directly. During the extraction process, other impurities are completely removed from it to get pure nicotine. Such a pure form of nicotine is used in all e-juices on the market today. Freebase nicotine has a pH range of 7 to 8 with a high alkalinity nature. This pH level is crucial to decide the severity of the harshness that the person can experience from inhaling the nicotine. The higher the nicotine percentage in e-liquids, the harsher it changes.
Here comes a need for the nicotine salt, as some acids are added to the freebase nicotine to reduce the pH level of the e-liquids. Now the vaper feels less irritation of using e-liquids and thus, you can vape higher nicotine salt. The acid introduced in these nicotine salts to reduce the pH level is the Benzoic acid and thus, vaper experiences much smoother hit when inhaling the e-liquids.
Benzoic Acid Purpose:
There are three main reasons to use the Benzoic acid in the freebase nicotine such as:
- The acid helps the nicotine salt to get vaporize easily even at lower temperatures
- The acid reduces the pH levels in the Nicotine salt that helps the vaper to experience the smoother hit
- Benzoic acid helps the Nicotine salt to undergo a reaction which allows for easy absorption as freebase nicotine.
Are Nicotine salts safe?
When you consider the safety of using nicotine salt, this topic has been a continuous debate between doctors, federal organizations, advocates and other personalities, etc. When compared to the regular e-liquids, the nicotine salt is considered to be one percentage safer than a regular one.
Though nicotine salts are somewhat safer when compared to pure nicotine, there is one issue with the nicotine salts. As already said, nicotine salts are not able to vaporize into vape juice as pure nicotine much benzoic acid is added to balance the issue. So, the benzoic acid content in nicotine salts is much higher and thus research has been done over the benzoic acid. According to toxicology reports, there is no danger when one inhales the benzoic acid for few times, but dangerous when one has a long-term habit. Thus, it does not consider when one uses nicotine salts or freebase nicotine or nicotine with benzoic acid, as the vaping is less dangerous than smoking.
Therefore, nicotine salts are much useful for the one to get rid of the cigarette smoking habit. The presence of high nicotine content makes the person feel like smoking the cigarette and thus, help him to get rid of addiction.