No Smoke Coming From Face, Please

This one came out of left field while we were having some frozen yogurt a few nights back.

Time flies, there was a pandemic, sure, but we had never seen an official No Vaping sign before.

How sad that we even need such a thing.  I can see it now: millions of people convinced by the all-so-trustworthy tobacco industry that vaping is safe, and so many of them vaping in front of No Smoking signs ready to give a lecture on how they're totally NOT smoking.  But there is smoke coming out of their face, so well, I guess we need more laws and signage.

After getting over the initial sad sigh of it all, I had to wonder exactly when this new sign came into being.

Google was no help at all.  I had no idea that something as boring as a tube of gunk could be drawn in so many different ways.  Is there really no standard?  Are we imagining that ANY of these signs has ever been standard?  And the flipside: how do you make this new tube of a thing not look like a cigarette?

How about ComplianceSigns?  They always seemed to have very official materials, but there is still a huge variety, some separate signs, merged signs, even different art to choose from.  My pick would be this one, even better would be one that said "OMG just stop it already. We can smell it from over here."  The closest I could find was this collection of signs with "Nicotine Free Baseball Property" that clearly got tired of trying to explain it in words.  But what if I had a nicotine patch on?  How is it this complicated?

Of course it's going to vary by state.  Here is an overview of the current state laws, but it's safe to say that no single official logogram is going to be found at the end of this trail. As to when they appeared, I can guess that the signs appeared some days before or after the various laws passed.  In New York state the date was November 22, 2017.  That link mentions an international No Smoking symbol but I could find no mention of an international No Vaping symbol.

And I'm sure you can hope onto Etsy and find all kinds of symbols and signs for this with special artistic flourishes ...

While I have been mostly kidding around, I do find it sad that it is the business owners who have to constantly spend more to keep up with the increasing weight of rules. In any case, we saw a symbol we had not seen before and I went searching for its roots.