Vaping is all the rage right now. For some, it is all in the name of good fun — blowing o’s, whipping up smoke tornadoes, and other cool tricks are certainly impressive and can liven up any boring party. Others use vapes and e-cigarettes as a way to give up tobacco smoking by substituting it with a less harmful alternative.
Once you get deep into the wide world of vaping and the wide variety of flavors at your disposal, you might want to try your hand at creating DIY vape juice. It’s not as challenging of a task as it may seem at first, although it still requires quite a bit of expertise and e-liquid know-how.
If you’re completely new to vaping and feel like you need to educate yourself a bit more on the subject, you can find out more about the best vape juices at www.herbonaut.com. It’ll surely bring you up to speed on the different flavors and compositions of e-juice available on the market.
But if you already have some experience with e-liquids and want to make your own DIY e-juice, this guide will equip you with all the right knowledge you will need to get started!
What You Will Need
Aside from tiny plastic bottles and syringes, you should get quite a fair amount of things to make vape juice. If you’re uncertain about where to get all of the right chemicals on their own, you can always order a starter kit online. In most cases, they will have everything you could possibly need, and more.
Without any further ado, here is a list of ingredients you’re going to need in order to complete your very first vape juice DIY project:
- Base liquid. This is composed of two chemicals, which will form the very basis of your e-juice: propylene glycol (PG) and vegetable glycerin (VG). When mixing, you can experiment with the PG/VG ratio, but most people usually go with the 50/50 or 70/30 standard ratios. This is also how they will be mixed if you order a ready-made mixture.
- Flavor concentrate. Technically, the VG/PG base is all you need to have to enjoy blowing thick clouds with your vape, but it will be flavorless. In order to make your habit taste good, you’re going to have to get a flavor concentrate. This is one of the most complicated parts of the entire process, as there are countless options available on the market, and, as opposed to PG or VG, the brand and quality of the products do matter. You can either buy a couple of bottles of concentrate and mix them yourself or buy a “one-shot”, which is a pre-mixed flavor composed out of a few different concentrates.
- Nicotine. We don’t need to mention that nicotine is an addictive chemical and it isn’t really required to enjoy your DIY e-liquid. However, if you use it responsibly, it can be a nice additive to your e-juice, providing you with a pleasant buzz and a familiar throat hit. As a beginner, you should shop around for 36 or 48 mg/ml 100ml bottles — if you put too much nicotine in, you might end up messing up your juice!
How to Mix the Ingredients
There are two basic ways of mixing your PG/VG base, flavor concentrate, and liquid nicotine. The first one is known as mixing by weight, and as you may have already figured out, it entails using a very precise scale to get the amount of nicotine and other ingredients just right. Some substances are denser than others, and therefore a milliliter of PG is much lighter (in mg) than the same amount of VG. It’s not too hard to get right, but you can’t forget about it!
Mixing by volume is much easier to understand for beginners and will allow you to add various ingredients together with more comfort and confidence. It is less precise than the weight method and requires more equipment, such as syringes and squeeze bottles. You will still need to do some math and use a special calculator for chemical solutions, especially for nicotine. Eyeballing it may lead you to end up with diluted nicotine content (no buzz at all) or one that is too high (unsmokable).
The Bottom Line
The ingredients and methods outlined above form the basis of knowledge you should be equipped with before embarking on your first DIY vape juice project. Aside from that, you’re also going to have to get yourself an electronic scale with the capacity to measure down to 0.01g to make sure you’re getting the right ratios. You should also remember to always clean your syringes and squeeze bottles with distilled water. Using dirty containers can negatively impact the quality of your final product!
Creating your own vape juice is a cost-effective way to get your vape game on. It can also be a lot of fun, as with enough experience, you’ll be able to create unique flavors, potentially stumbling upon a game-changing combination!
