What Is IQOS and How Does It Work?

IQOS is a heated tobacco device. You slide a short stick of compressed tobacco into a holder, the holder heats it to roughly 350°C, and you inhale the aerosol that comes off. Nothing catches fire, so there is no ash, no glowing tip and no long-lasting smell in the room.

That is the whole mechanical story. The part that matters more is what does not change: the stick is real tobacco, the aerosol carries real nicotine, and your body responds to it the way it responded to cigarettes.

How does heated tobacco actually work?

A cigarette burns. The tip of a lit cigarette reaches somewhere between 600 and 900°C, and that heat is what breaks tobacco down into the roughly 7,000 chemicals found in cigarette smoke, at least 70 of which are known carcinogens (CDC). Tar and carbon monoxide are products of that fire.

Heated tobacco tries to sit below that threshold. The device warms the stick to about 350°C, which is hot enough to release nicotine and the glycerol that carries it into a visible aerosol, but not hot enough for sustained combustion. No fire, no ash, far less carbon monoxide.

There are two generations of the hardware in common use:

• Blade or pin heaters (the earlier design, used with HEETS-style sticks) push a heated element into the centre of the tobacco plug. These need periodic cleaning because residue builds up on the blade.
• Induction heaters (the ILUMA generation, used with TEREA-style sticks) put a metal strip inside the stick itself and heat it electromagnetically, so nothing is inserted and nothing needs cleaning.

Either way, the session is time-boxed. The heater runs for about six minutes or 14 puffs, whichever arrives first, then shuts down. You cannot take a twenty-third puff without starting a new stick.

How is IQOS different from smoking?

The honest answer is: in the chemistry of what comes off, meaningfully. In the experience of being dependent, barely at all.

What genuinely changes is combustion. Tar is a combustion product and there is no equivalent in an aerosol produced at 350°C. Carbon monoxide levels are much lower. Ash disappears, and so does the smell that gets into upholstery and hair.

What does not change is the ritual and the chemistry your brain cares about. You still reach for something roughly every hour. You still step outside after dinner. You still take 12 to 14 pulls and feel the same settling. The stick is still tobacco, and the nicotine still arrives fast enough to reinforce the loop.

How is IQOS different from a vape?

People lump the two together because both produce an aerosol from a rechargeable device, but the contents are not related.

	IQOS (heated tobacco)	Vape (e-cigarette)
What is heated	A stick of processed tobacco leaf	A liquid of propylene glycol, glycerine, nicotine and flavourings
Contains tobacco	Yes	No
Session length	Fixed: about 6 minutes or 14 puffs	Open-ended; you decide when to stop
Natural endpoint	Built into the device	None
Typical use pattern	Countable sessions, like cigarettes	Hundreds of small puffs spread across the day
Regulated as	A tobacco product in most countries	Varies widely by country

That fourth row is the difference people underestimate. A vape has no ending, which is why so many users drift into taking three or four hundred puffs a day without noticing. Heated tobacco keeps the cigarette’s shape: a discrete session you can count on your fingers.

For anyone trying to reduce, that is quietly useful. Something with edges is easier to measure than something continuous.

Is IQOS safer than smoking?

This is where the marketing and the evidence separate, and it deserves its own careful answer.

The manufacturer’s position is that heating rather than burning produces substantially lower levels of many harmful chemicals. Independent laboratories broadly agree that levels of several well-known combustion toxicants are lower, while also finding some compounds present at levels comparable to or higher than in cigarette smoke.

The regulatory position is narrower than the advertising. In 2020 the US Food and Drug Administration authorised IQOS to be marketed with a reduced exposure claim and explicitly declined to authorise a reduced risk claim, on the grounds that the evidence did not support one. Those are different sentences, and the gap between them is the entire debate.

The World Health Organization’s position is that heated tobacco products are tobacco products, that all tobacco is harmful, and that reduced exposure to some toxicants has not been shown to translate into reduced disease. Modern heated tobacco reached its first markets around 2014. Cigarettes were understood to be lethal only after decades of accumulated data. There has not been enough time to know.

What this means if you use it

Most people who pick up IQOS are not curious technologists. They are smokers who wanted a step down, or who wanted to stop smelling of smoke, or who were told it was the sensible compromise.

If that is you, the step you took was real and it was not the last one. Heated tobacco removes the fire. It leaves the dependence entirely intact, and dependence is what decides whether you are still spending money and mornings on this in ten years.

The useful move is not to relitigate whether it is 90 or 95 per cent of anything. It is to find out what your actual number is.

For two minutes today, do nothing but count. How many sticks did you use? Not your estimate, the count. Most people are one to three sticks above what they would have guessed, and that gap is the whole reason vague plans to “cut down soon” never move.

Puff Counter was built for exactly that: it logs each stick or puff as you take it, then rebuilds next week’s limit from your real average rather than a number you picked optimistically on a Sunday.

Knowing what you are actually using is not a commitment to quit. It just makes quitting a decision you can make with real information instead of a hopeful guess.