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Flavour ghosting can ruin your vaping experience ... especially when you're discovering new e-liquid flavours! It’s also completely avoidable with a little prior care and planning. In this article, we’ll explain what flavour ghosting is, and show you how to stop it spoiling your vape.
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What is flavour ghosting?
Flavour ghosting happens when you move from one e-liquid flavour to another. You fill your vape with a brand new e-liquid, but you can still taste the previous flavour lingering in the background. Either that, or the ‘old’ flavour and the ‘new’ flavour combine in your vape device to create a taste profile you’re not expecting.
Different flavours will ghost worse than others, and sometimes flavour ghosting is unnoticeable (or even tasty). There are a few simple steps you can take to prevent flavour ghosting. We’ll explain all this, but first let’s talk about why flavour ghosting happens in the first place...
What causes flavour ghosting?
When your vape's juice tank runs dry, a tiny residual amount of e-liquid is often left behind. Trace amounts of the old e-liquid can cling to the valves and the corners in your vape’s reservoir. Because e-liquid reservoirs are so small (max 2ml - source: gov.uk), trace amounts of old flavouring can pollute the taste of whatever juice comes next.
Ghosting doesn’t just happen in the tank. If your vape wick is drenched in old e-liquid, you can get a ghosting sensation there, too. Sometimes you can just 'burn through' the old flavour with a couple of puffs. If that doesn't work, you might need to replace the wick and/or vape coil.
The same goes for e-liquid syringes. E-liquid syringes are a really convenient way to transfer juice from bottle to tank (and you can buy them here). If you use a syringe to fill your tank, then traces of e-liquid can cling to the syringe, too. The only way to manage this is to keep everything really clean and dry (more on this in a moment).
The worst kinds of flavour ghosting:
Flavour ghosting isn’t always a problem. Most vapers don’t even notice when they move between similar-tasting e-liquids (from mango to mango, for instance). When you swap between major flavour categories (for instance, from tobacco to a dessert flavour), you can get some pretty foul taste combinations.
Menthol flavours are delicious and refreshing, but they tend to be the worst culprits when it comes to flavour ghosting. Our brains pick up on the ‘coolness’ of menthol with the hot/cold receptors in our mouth. These receptors are there to tell us if something is too hot or too cold to eat/drink. They are completely separate to the 'normal' tasting system that picks up on flavours like salt, sweet and so on (source: US National Library of Medicine). This means that menthol is very hard to ignore. Most of us will notice even trace amounts of it when we’re switching from an ice to a non-ice flavour.
How to get old flavours out of an e-cigarette
Ghosted flavours usually disappear after a few minutes of vaping. If you’re still tasting an old e-juice in your vape after an extended period of time (a few hours or more), then you might need to replace or clean a few parts.
Cleaning your syringe and vape tank:
The simplest way to clean vape tanks and syringes is with a bowl of warm water. First, you just need to unscrew and separate everything into its component parts. Leave the loose tank and syringe parts to soak in a bowl of warm water for at least twenty minutes. Clean and dry the parts well with a microfibre cloth. If you don't have a microfibre cloth, kitchen roll will do the trick. Put everything back together carefully. Add a small amount of your new e-liquid, just to make sure that nothing is leaking, then carry on as normal.
Replacing your components:
If you’ve cleaned out your tank and you’re still tasting the old e-liquid flavour, then it’s probably time to replace your coil. If your coil gets gunked up, or if an old flavour caramelises on your coil, then it will lose its efficiency. The old flavour will linger for longer, because it’s not being evaporated away properly. If this happens, your best bet is to just swap out the wick and/or the coil and start fresh.
How to avoid flavour ghosting altogether:
All of this cleaning and swapping can be a bit of a pain if you like to keep lots of different flavours on the go. To keep the maintenance down, you can keep multiple vape devices in use at any one time. At Gourmet E-Liquid HQ, we have a constantly-rotating collection of mods on the go so that we can test out the latest tobacco, menthol and beverage flavours. The trick is to label your vape devices. Otherwise, you’ll get your vape pen or box mods confused and you’ll get a mouthful of a flavour you weren’t expecting (this has happened to me more than once).
Which e-liquid flavours don’t ghost?
Every flavour of e-liquid has the potential to ghost on you, because flavour ghosting happens when you move from one flavour to another. Menthol flavours are probably the worst culprits, but a sweet flavour is just as capable of ghosting on you if you let the vape juice caramelise on your coil (learn more about coil caramelisation here).
If you have a high-PG e-liquid, the e-liquid is often runnier. This could, in theory, help it clear through your vape faster than a high VG liquid (learn more about Propylene Glycol here). In practice, if your coil is gunked up or if your vape tank is dirty, the viscosity of your e-liquids won’t make much of a difference.
The best way to avoid flavour ghosting is to simply follow the steps we've mentioned in this article. Keep your kit clean, and if you love to switch between flavours, then keep more than one vape device. Your odds of flavour ghosting will drop dramatically, and you’ll stay in control of the flavours hitting your taste buds.
That's it! We hope this week’s article has given you a better idea of what flavour ghosting actually is, and how to avoid it in future. If you need any further help or advice, get in touch. We’re always happy to help our customers to make the most of their vaping experience.
Stay safe and happy vaping!
John Boughey