Even if you don’t live in the United Kingdom, there are plenty of reasons why buying e-liquid from a UK-based seller like Pure E-Liquids might make sense. Chief among those reasons is that, at the moment, it may not always be easy for you to find your favorite e-liquids domestically. The COVID-19 pandemic has created serious supply chain issues in every industry, and the vaping industry isn’t immune from those issues. You could easily encounter a situation in which your favorite vape juice isn’t available from a domestic seller, but it is available overseas. You could always try a new e-liquid flavor, of course, but ordering overseas might be the better option if you can’t be happy with anything other than your usual juice.

If you order e-liquid from the UK, though, you’re going to encounter a new type of e-liquid that might be unfamiliar to you. The type of e-liquid that we’re referring to is short-fill e-liquid.

So, what is short-fill e-liquid, and how does it work? Will short-fill vape juice put a kink in your plan to buy e-liquid from an overseas seller? This article will explain it all.

What Is Short-Fill E-Liquid?
To understand short-fill e-liquid, you need to understand a bit about the laws that regulate vaping in the United Kingdom and Europe. A European law called the Tobacco Products Directive sets limits on what companies in the tobacco and vaping industries can do to market their products. Two of those limits apply specifically to e-liquid. They are:

• No e-liquid with nicotine can have a nicotine strength higher than 20 mg/ml.
• No e-liquid with nicotine can come in a bottle larger than 10 ml.

What this means is that, if you want to buy a standard nicotine e-liquid from a seller in the United Kingdom or Europe, you’ll be buying a lot of 10 ml bottles. That’s especially true if your preferred nicotine strength is 3 mg/ml. If you use a powerful sub-ohm tank, 10 ml of e-liquid might not even be enough to last a full day. Placing a large e-liquid order with a UK-based seller would mean buying many, many small bottles and paying a hefty shipping charge.

Vapers in the UK and Europe also find 10 ml bottles of e-liquid pretty inconvenient, and that’s why short-fill e-liquid exists.

A short-fill e-liquid bottle is a large, partially empty bottle of nicotine-free e-liquid. Large e-liquid bottles are perfectly acceptable if they contain no nicotine, so short-fill e-liquid doesn’t violate the Tobacco Products Directive.

How does the nicotine get into the e-liquid? You add that yourself in the form of a nicotine shot. A nicotine shot is an unflavored bottle of e-liquid with a volume of 10 ml and a typical nicotine strength of 18 mg/ml. Since the nicotine shot has the appropriate size and nicotine strength, it also doesn’t violate the Tobacco Products Directive.

How Do You Buy Short-Fill E-Liquids?
When you buy short-fill e-liquid, you’ll need one or more nicotine shots for each bottle of e-liquid that you buy. Since the most popular nicotine strength among sub-ohm device users is 3 mg/ml, short-fill e-liquids and nicotine shots are generally set up to achieve that as a final nicotine strength.

• If a short-fill e-liquid contains 50 ml of vape juice in a 60 ml bottle, you’ll need one 10 ml nicotine shot to make a final nicotine strength of 3 mg/ml.

• If a short-fill e-liquid contains 100 ml of vape juice in a 120 ml bottle, you’ll need two 10 ml nicotine shots to make a final nicotine strength of 3 mg/ml.

Don’t worry too much about making sure that you get things right when buying short-fill e-liquid. As long as your desired nicotine strength is 3 mg/ml, the math is easy. Just dump in nicotine shots until the bottle is full, and you’re good to go. A good UK vape shop will make the process easy for you to understand, and nicotine shots are always very inexpensive. An empty bottle for mixing may also come in handy.

How Do You Use Short-Fill E-Liquids?
When you receive your short-fill e-liquid, you’ll have at least one bottle of e-liquid and at least one nicotine shot and will need to combine the two.

Start with the larger bottle. Your goal is to pry that thing open. Remove the cap, and then try wiggling the nozzle off of the bottle with your fingers. If the nozzle is stuck, you may need to pry it up with a butter knife. Be very careful to avoid spilling the e-liquid.

Once you’ve got the nozzle removed, pour the full contents of at least one nicotine shot into the short-fill bottle. Again, you’ll want to use one nicotine shot for a short-fill bottle size of 60 ml or two nicotine shots for a bottle size of 120 ml.

After you’ve combined your short-fill e-liquid with your nicotine shot, replace the nozzle and cap on your short-fill bottle. Shake the bottle well before using it.

The Most Important Thing About Using Short-Fill E-Liquids
The one key thing to remember when you use short-fill e-liquid is that you don’t have the same industrial mixing equipment that the vape juice makers of the world have at their disposal. When you use an e-liquid that already has the nicotine mixed in, you never really have to worry about the ingredients separating out of the mixture. You can use the entire bottle without ever shaking it or worrying about the flavor changing. An industrial mixer can shake a bottle so hard – and for so long – that the ingredients essentially combine permanently.

When you shake a bottle of short-fill e-liquid manually, your arm can’t possibly compare to the strength of an industrial mixing machine. In addition to the fact that a nicotine shot contains nicotine and a short-fill e-liquid doesn’t, the two bottles may also have differing ratios of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol. To keep the ingredients evenly distributed, you should shake short-fill e-liquid each time you fill your tank.