What is vape juice made of? Four parts, measured
What is vape juice made of? PG, VG, nicotine and flavourings, plus sweetener in some, with the amounts three lab studies actually measured.
What is vape juice made of? Four main parts: propylene glycol (PG) and vegetable glycerin (VG), which form the base, plus nicotine and flavouring chemicals. Some bottles also carry a sweetener such as sucralose. Lab work treats the base and nicotine as the main components; flavour chemicals in one maker’s refills reached 10 mg/mL or more in 26% of bottles.
Evergreen: this desk read three peer-reviewed study abstracts on PubMed on 30 October 2026. Nothing here was tested by this desk; every figure is the researchers’. For the coil and aerosol, see what is in a vape.
What is vape juice made of, ingredient by ingredient?
| Ingredient | Job | What a lab measured |
|---|---|---|
| PG and VG (glycerol) | The base | Determined with nicotine in one LC-MS/MS run (Kubica, 2023) |
| Nicotine | The drug | Below detection to 11.24 mg/mL in Kubica’s samples, matching labels |
| Flavour chemicals | Taste and smell | 1 to 50 per bottle, 126 across 103 bottles of one maker’s refills (Omaiye, 2020) |
| Sucralose, in some | Sweetness | 0.14 wt% in a lab liquid made organochlorine compounds on vaping (Duell, 2019) |
How much flavouring is in a bottle?
Omaiye and colleagues analysed refill fluids made by one company, Ritchy LTD, sold worldwide. Total flavour chemicals were at least 1 mg/mL in 70% of the 103 bottles and at least 10 mg/mL in 26%. Twenty-eight chemicals reached 1 mg/mL in at least one product. For a bottle sold as strawberry, that is a lot of chemistry doing the talking.
That is one maker’s range, not every bottle on sale. The authors also calculated a nontrivial cancer risk from pulegone and estragole in some products, a margin-of-exposure estimate rather than observed harm in people.
Is vape juice made of glycerin?
Partly. VG is vegetable glycerin, and it shares the base with PG; that split is what a 50/50 or 70/30 label describes (see our ratio explainer). Kubica measured the ratios, but the abstract does not give the values. Sweetener left on a coil is its own problem, covered in why a vape tastes burnt.
FAQ
What are the 4 main ingredients in vape juice?
Propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, nicotine and flavourings. Kubica’s 2023 method paper calls glycerol, propylene glycol and nicotine the main components of refill liquids and measured all three in a single analysis. Flavourings are the fourth part: in one maker’s refills, total flavour chemicals passed 1 mg/mL in 70% of bottles.
Is there sugar in vape juice?
The three study abstracts read here do not report table sugar. What they do report is the sweetener sucralose, which can be added by the maker or by the user. Duell and colleagues wrote in 2019 that its prevalence and typical concentration were not known. In their lab tests, 0.24 wt% was enough to drive significant breakdown of the base when vaped.
What chemicals are in vape juice?
Beyond the base and nicotine, flavour chemicals: 126 different ones turned up across 103 bottles from one maker, between 1 and 50 per bottle. Six, including furaneol, ethyl maltol and vanillin, correlated with cytotoxicity in cell tests. Heating adds more: sucralose produced organochlorine compounds on vaping in a 2019 lab study.
Whatever the flavour chemistry adds, the active ingredient is nicotine, an addictive drug. This site is for adults of legal purchase age in their market only, and nothing here is a reason to start.