Ice vape flavours: where the chill comes from and how to get it right

There are two ways to make a vape feel cold. The first is menthol, which triggers the cold receptors in your mouth and throat but brings a minty flavour with it. The second is a family of synthetic cooling agents, with WS-23 the most common in e-liquid. Vapers often call all of these koolada, after the trade name of a close relative, WS-3.

Cooling agents feel cold with very little taste or smell. That is why a modern bar-style mango ice tastes of mango with a cold finish, rather than mango toothpaste. Many liquids blend a touch of menthol with a cooling agent to get both crispness and a clean flavour.

Labels give you a rough idea of how cold a liquid will be, though brands use the words differently, so treat them as hints rather than rules.

• Chilled or frost: a light cooling finish, the fruit does most of the talking.
• Ice: the standard bar-style level, clearly cold on the exhale.
• Polar or arctic: serious cold, often with menthol added.
• Menthol ice: cooling agent plus menthol, the coldest combination going. See our menthol ice range.

Most people land in the middle. If a liquid makes your eyes water on the first puff, it is not you, it is the label telling the truth.

Ice flavours were made popular by disposables and bar-style pods, so they feel most at home in a mouth-to-lung pod filled with a 50/50 nic salt. The tight draw gives a smooth, even chill that lasts all day.

Put the same flavour through a sub-ohm tank with a 70/30 shortfill and the cooling goes up dramatically, simply because you are pulling much more vapour across your throat. Some vapers love that winter-wind feeling. Others find they need to drop to a lighter ice or a non-ice version for sub-ohm use.

Nicotine strength is a separate decision from cooling. Nicotine is addictive, and a cold liquid can make a high strength feel smoother than it really is, so choose the number on the label deliberately.

Almost any fruit can be iced, but a few combinations have become fixtures because the cold genuinely improves them. Watermelon ice is the benchmark: juicy, sweet and refreshing. Pineapple ice works because the tartness and the chill sharpen each other, as in the Riot Bar Edition Pineapple Ice. Peach ice softens a very sweet fruit, and strawberry ice stops strawberry tipping into jam.

Banana ice is the curveball. Banana is heavy and creamy, so the cold lightens it into something closer to a frozen smoothie. If you have never tried it, it is the best argument for how much ice can change a flavour rather than just chilling it.

Cooling agents themselves are clear and vaporise cleanly, so the ice part of an ice liquid is rarely what kills a coil. The fruit base usually is. Bar-style fruit ice liquids are often quite sweet, and sweetener is what turns cotton brown.

The catch with ice is that it hides decline. A gunked coil normally announces itself with a burnt, muddy taste, but cooling can carry on feeling crisp while the fruit fades into the background. Many ice vapers only realise their coil is finished when they fit a new one and the flavour suddenly comes back.

Use the checklist below to keep the chill and the flavour arriving together.

If a liquid is too icy, you have options before binning it. Drop the wattage a few watts and close the airflow slightly: less vapour means less cooling. On a pod, take shorter, gentler draws.

You can also mix it with the non-ice version of the same flavour, or with another fruit at the same nicotine strength and ratio. Half and half takes the edge off neatly.

The opposite problem, ice that stops feeling cold, is usually palate fatigue. Your senses get used to a constant chill. A day or two on something else, such as a melon liquid without ice, normally brings the cold back. Prefer the minty kind of cold? Head to our menthol and mint guide.