How do you think about implied volatility before buying an option?

Implied volatility is the market's estimate of how much a stock might move, baked into an option's price. When it is high, options are expensive; when it is low, they are cheap. A simple way to see this: if a stock's option costs 2.00 when implied volatility is 25%, the same option might cost 1.20 when it falls to 15%, even if the stock price hasn't changed at all. (These are made-up numbers, just to show the mechanism.) That is why the question is less "is this option cheap or expensive in dollars" and more "is the premium high or low relative to where this stock's implied volatility usually sits." Many educators suggest comparing current implied volatility to its own past range, sometimes called IV rank or IV percentile, rather than judging it in isolation. Public data sources differ in how they calculate these figures, so it's worth checking the definition each one uses. What does your process look like? Do you check implied volatility against its history before you buy, and if so, what tells you a premium is too rich to pay?