Shelf Life of Vape Liquids
The following article reflects the blogger’s personal experience and not the shop’s opinion!
You often see questions in vaping forums such as “has an e-liquid ever gone off on you?” or “I’ve got a four-year-old e-liquid — can I still vape it?” Leaving food regulations aside, and just between us vapers, I still have e-liquids and flavour concentrates dating back to 2011.
An e-liquid can’t really go off. Quite simply because e-liquids are full of preservatives — PG is a preservative, and if it’s a nicotine e-liquid from abroad, nicotine ultimately helps preserve it too. An e-liquid can’t go off! Chemically impossible — otherwise your toothpaste would go off too, but in reality, the most it can do is dry out.
E-liquids that I’ve left open for years tend to taste even better over time. What could happen, at least in theory, is that an e-liquid bottle is left open somewhere for a few hours and then, again in theory, some speck of dust finds its way into the e-liquid and then (once again, purely theoretically) the e-liquid could spoil. But then you’d see streaks in the liquid. In six years, I’ve only known of one case like that!
With flavour concentrates, it’s even simpler. Bottles of concentrate that are almost empty simply lose their flavour if they sit around for a few years. I’ve opened sealed bottles of concentrate after five years and couldn’t tell any difference from new concentrates at all. Even half-full bottles of concentrate have still been absolutely fine for me after five years. In short, opened flavour concentrates don’t go bad, but after a few years the flavour can simply evaporate.
And what about base liquids for DIY mixing? I keep mine in the fridge for years too, especially nicotine. Apparently, there are even people who stash nicotine bases in the freezer. Nicotine from abroad is also in a base, and that base is usually PG — and PG is a preservative.
What you can do with opened flavour concentrates that you rarely use and that might simply lose their flavour, or what you can do with concentrates that just don’t taste good to you in an e-liquid — I’ll tell you next week.
