Picture this: You’re cleaning out your desk or dresser, and in the back, you find an old bottle of vape juice that you’ve forgotten about. E-liquid isn’t cheap, and it’s always nice to discover that you can put off going to the vape shop for a few more days. When you look closely at the bottle, though, you see that the expiration date has passed. In fact, it passed quite some time ago. Is it still safe to use? What happens when vape juice expires?
Read on to learn everything that you need to know.
When Does Vape Juice Expire?
Vape juice expires approximately a year after it’s made. In most cases, you’ll find an expiration date printed somewhere on the bottle. Sometimes, it’ll be on the outer box. If you happen to have a bottle of e-liquid without a printed expiration date, you can assume that it’s expired if you purchased it more than a year ago.
With all of those things being said, though, it’s not as though a bottle of vape juice self-destructs a year after it’s made. In most cases, it’s perfectly safe to use e-liquid that’s a bit on the old side. You might not want to use it if you have an alternative, though, because the changes that take place in vape juice as it ages will affect both its flavour and its potency.
What Happens to Vape Juice When It Expires?
To know why vape juice has an expiration date, you need to understand what’s happening inside the bottle. Many of the compounds that are used to make e-liquid – particularly the flavouring agents and the nicotine – are volatile and degrade into other compounds over time. Once a bottle of vape juice is very old, it won’t taste anything like it did when it was new. It also won’t have the nicotine content that it originally did because the nicotine will have degraded to the point where a large portion of it is no longer active or bioavailable. With those two things in mind, using an old bottle of vape juice probably isn’t going to be a very good experience at all.
Another thing that you need to know about the expiration date on vape juice is that the date is only valid as long as you haven’t opened the bottle. When you open a bottle of e-liquid, you’re exposing it to air and hastening the rate at which it oxidises and degrades. So, if you’ve already opened the bottle of vape juice that you’ve found in the back of a drawer, the flavour may have changed completely even if the bottle’s expiration date is still a few months away.
With all of those things having been said, it’s perfectly acceptable in most cases to use vape juice that’s expired if you’re still happy with the flavour. Chances are that if something is so wrong with the e-liquid that it wouldn’t be safe to use, it’ll also taste horrible.
When should you not use an expired bottle of vape juice? We’ll discuss that next.
When Is Expired Vape Juice Not Safe to Use?
The reason why old vape juice is usually safe to use is because the two main ingredients of most e-liquid – propylene glycol and vegetable glycerine – both have antimicrobial properties. Unless the e-liquid was badly contaminated with bacteria or fungi when it was bottled, it’s very unlikely that any microbial growth will occur in the bottle during the time in which you’re likely to use it.
How can you tell if vape juice might have a microbial contamination? Just look at the liquid inside the bottle. If you see visible clouds or sediment in in the e-liquid, you shouldn’t use it. A severe colour change can also be a sign of microbial growth. Note that it’s normal for vape juice to turn yellow as it ages due to the oxidation of the nicotine. If the vape juice has turned brown to black, you shouldn’t use it.
How Can You Make Vape Juice Last Longer?
Buying vape juice in bulk is a great way to save money because vape shops often offer discounts when people are willing to purchase in larger quantities. Even if you don’t normally buy large quantities of e-liquid when you stock up, you may still encounter a situation in which you’ll want to buy more than usual because your favourite vape shop is having a great sale. So, how can you make sure that those bottles of e-liquid are as tasty a year from now as they are today? Just follow these two simple rules.
- Keep a bottle of vape juice closed until you’re ready to use it. If you open a bottle and come back to it after several months, it definitely won’t taste the same as it did when it was new.
- Store your vape juice in a cool, dark place such as a cabinet in an air-conditioned room. If you’re planning to store the e-liquid for a very long time, consider putting it in your refrigerator or freezer. A cold temperature will slow down the chemical processes that cause the e-liquid’s flavour and nicotine content to degrade.
Wrapping Up: “Expired” Vape Juice Isn’t Always Bad
Reading this article, you’ve learned how long you can expect vape juice to last and what you can do to make it last even longer. If you take anything away from what you’ve read today, it should be these three points.
- Vape juice expires about a year after it’s made. If you have a bottle with no expiration date, you should assume that it’s not going to provide a great experience if it’s more than a year old.
- The expiration date only applies if the bottle has never been opened. Once the vape juice in the bottle has been exposed to the outside air, oxidation will occur rapidly. This can cause the e-liquid’s flavour to become badly degraded before it reaches the expiration date.
- If a bottle of e-liquid is past its expiration date, there’s no reason not to use it if it has no signs of microbial contamination and you still like the flavour.