This study was conducted to determine the hookah smoking profiles among university students and theirperceptions of the health effects of hookah. The stratified random sampling method was used, and eachschool was accepted as a layer. The number of students to be included in the sample from each class wasdetermined by dividing the total number of students to be taken from the school by the number of classesin that school. After determining the number of students who would be taken from each class, the students to be included in the sample were selected from the student lists using a simple random samplingmethod. The sample of this study included 625 students from a university. The data collection tools were(a) a personal information form containing the sociodemographic characteristics of the students, thecharacteristics of smoking and hookah smoking behavior, and (b) the perception scale of the effects ofhookah use on health. The data were collected by the researchers between February 5 and May 5, 2018,by distributing the questionnaires and scale forms to the students in the classroom environment andhaving them fill the forms. The data obtained were evaluated in the Statistical Package for the SocialSciences 22.0 program using chi-square, significance test of the difference between the 2 means, varianceanalysis, Mann–Whitney U test, Kruskal–Wallis H test, and logistic regression analysis. In this study,it was found that the frequency of hookah use was 65.2% in male students and 34.8% in female students,and the mean score of the students from the perception scale of the effects of hookah use on health was60.83±9.96. The mean score of the students who do not smoke hookah (62.53±9.70) was higher than thatof those who smoke hookah (57.45±9.83), and the difference between them was statistically significant(p<0.05). It was found that students who did not use hookah knew better about the harmful effects ofhookah than those who used hookah. It was also found that smoking cigarettes increases the possibilityof smoking hookah by 3.05 (confidence interval, 1.11-8.33) times. As a result, the frequency of smokinghookah was found to be high among the students, and the students who smoke hookah were less aware ofthe adverse health effects of hookah use.