Shenae Grimes Smokes and her show has been renewed, she got her very first big tabloid cover, and as far as her stinky cancer stick regime is concerned, she’s borrowing a line from Edith Piaf: Non, je ne regrette rien.

Shenae Grimes, who left the wilds of Forest Hill in Toronto earlier this year for the prime-time posh code 90210, refuses to apologize for smoking. In fact, the new-school queen is adamant about it being her choice. Get used to it, she basically tells her critics.

“I started smoking at about 16, and one in five teenagers smokes,” she sent word through her own blog the other day, after umpteenth images were published of her lighting up. “My hope,” she later went on, “is that you will all just stop hating and get on with it. I smoke. My choice. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but this is who I am.”

OK, we get it: She’s sticking up for her right to sticks. But how, more curiously, does this real-life dirty habit factor into her fake-life screen-projection? This sort of house of mirrors I always find more interesting. Lots of celebs smoke, of course — a non-smoking starlet is rarer that an Amy Winehouse spotted at a juice bar — but not all smoking celebs are created equally.

When Mary-Kate Olsen smokes, as she seems do a lot, it seems un-shoocking in that it goes with her crazy-girl exterior and her bag-lady garbs. When Sienna Miller smokes, as she’s no slouch at, it’s a neat narrative fit with her brazen ways and her femme fatale rep. When James Dean smoked, it was, naturally, part of the whole renegade act, as it is today with screw-you Sean Penn.

“Indelible” is how a New York Times piece, a few years ago, described smoking in Hollywood culture. “On screen, actors use cigarettes to shape a character; off screen, if they smoke, sometimes it’s their own image they’re embellishing,” stated the article.

And whether it “helps or hurts” comes down to one thing, according to Steven Ross, a professor of history at the University of California, who’s churned out several books on Hollywood’s influence on society. “It’s largely pegged to your cinematic persona,” he suggests. “If you have a clean and wholesome image, smoking makes you less wholesome.”

So, where, I wonder, does this leave Shenae from Toronto, whose role on the new Beverly Hills 90210 is basically as the “good girl,” the Pollyanna who finds out she’s not in Kansas anymore when she and her family move to Snob Ground Zero? Might the “good girl” turn a darker shade as the show goes on?