Let’s learn about pg to vg ratio

I see a lot of juice makers write ratios on their bottles that clearly do not correspond to the actual ratio of the fluid inside. My best guess is they add their flavoring and nicotine and fill the rest up with vg and call it 100% vg juice. This is clearly misleading. It gets worse. I recently purchased a bottle of e-liquid that said it was 100% vg only to open it up and realize that is was less they 50% vg. If you had to pin me down to a guess, I would guess that juice was about 40% vg.

Now the fda may not be concerned about this yet, but what motivation is there to falsely advertise your pg/vg ratio? The answer is probably either marketing tactics or lack of knowledge. I can’t do anything about it if this is a marketing tactic, but if you want to know more about actual ratios, keep reading.

We get asked by shops what our pg/vg ratio is. You want to know my answer? My answer is that I don’t know. Of course this makes me look like a fool at first until I explain myself. Let’s define ratio first. Ratio is a comparison of one number to the size of another number. So if you say your juice is 70/30, you are saying that for every 70 parts vg, there are 30 parts pg.

Now many shops and liquid companies will assume that if your flavoring and nicotine add up to 30% of your liquid and then you fill the remaining 70% of your batch with VG, your ratio of pg to vg is 30/70. This is NOT the case. This assumes all flavoring and nicotine are 100%pg. This implies there’s no flavoring or nicotine at all! Unless you extract your own flavoring or synthetically produce it, you do not know how much pg is in the flavoring. It is likely that most of the flavoring and nicotine have a high pg content, but concentrate manufacturers rarely tell juice makers how much so there is no way to know the actual ratio of pg to vg.

ORV liquids are 70% VG. We chose this amount because it produces a satisfying cloud in an rda, yet still carries enough flavor and will wick in entry level hardware. The rest is nicotine, flavoring, pg and other preservatives. Our liquids use concentrates from 3 to 8 manufacturers. These companies do not disclose how much of their flavoring is comprised of pg so there is no way for me to give you a ratio of pg to vg.

We are currently in the R & D stage of extracting our own tobacco and tea. When you ask me the pg/vg ratio of those end products, I will be able to give you an answer because I did the extracting.

So next time you make or purchase e-liquid, you will hopefully know exactly what you are talking about when it comes to pg/vg ratios.

If you would like to help clarify this point or make an analogy that is easy to understand, please feel free to comment below.

– Chad Chamberlain
Owner at Open Road Vapor