How your food turned millennial pink
Marketing companies are using this trend to sell product to women
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Maura Judkis.
Maybe you’ll start your day with a pink smoothie bowl, full of chia seeds and raspberries and other pink fruits.
On your way to work, you’ll pick up a Starbucks pink drink.
For lunch? A bowl of pink beet hummus, maybe garnished with some watermelon radish, which happens to be the perfect shade of fuchsia.
Wash it down with a blush-colored can of La Croix.
Dessert? An array of pink macarons.
For happy hour, the choices are abundant: pink cans of rosé, pink gin, pink tequila, bottles of wine with names like Summer Water and Pretty Young Thing, or frozen rosé (frosé).
Food is fashion, and fashion is food, and that’s why pink food became gradually, then suddenly, a thing.
Pink is in the air
One of the real drivers of the trend was the transformation of rosé from a slightly tacky punchline wine to a mark of affordable sophistication, a “lifestyle bevvie” and an expression of female sisterhood. #roséallday!
The color pairs particularly well with tiny cans — giving us about a dozen nearly identical choices, from Underwood, Lila Rosé and Trader Joe’s Simpler Wines.
Then, Pantone named Rose Quartz — a muted, dusty pink with the slightest hint of orange — one of its 2016 colors of the year. It was more sophisticated than Barbie pink, more cynical than magenta.
Brands like Thinx, an underwear company, and Acne jeans used the color in their marketing. The color took on a new name, thanks to the demographic that was most attracted to it: millennial pink.
It expanded to include a wider range of shades, from a classic, warmer pink to peachy-beige to salmon.
Endless pink
- There’s the list of “12 Foods To Satisfy Your Millennial Pink Tooth” by Refinery 29 (pink marshmallows, strawberry mochi ice cream and Belvoir Fruit Farms Elderflower and Rose Pressé — a brand that is on its way to La Croix-level cool-girl status).
- The cover of “Sweetbitter,” the coming-of-age novel about the New York restaurant scene.
- The 2016 launch of Le Creuset’s millennial pink “hibiscus” collection of cookware.
- The Museum of Ice Cream, an immersive ice cream-themed Instagram playground, for which guests will pay $29 a ticket to swim in a millennial-pink indoor pool full of artificial sprinkles.
- The Starbucks Unicorn Frappuccino, which was absolutely revolting, but sold out anyway.
So it became obvious, very quickly:
Make something pink and make money.
Free-spiritedness, casual luxury, youth, popularity: These are all qualities brands would like to associate with their products.
“The color keeps on selling product,” New York Magazine wrote in its extensive history of millennial pink.
Every time you take a photo of a Starbucks pink drink, Sugarfina rosé gummy bear or a can of La Croix, you’re helping them do it.
The gender question
It seems to make food needlessly gendered, too. Many words have been spent explaining that part of the appeal of millennial pink in fashion is that it is androgynous — Drake wears pink sweaters, singer Zayn Malik dyes his hair pink — but that’s not how it has played out in the food world. Rosé consumed by men needed its own name, brosé, to give it a harder edge, a distinction that wouldn’t be needed if we were truly, as GQ asserts, in an “egalitarian world of gender-fluid beverage consumption.”
But most pink foods and beverages are unambiguously marketed toward women.
A Bloomberg News article about La Croix’s triumph over its sparkling-water competition notes that “National Beverage originally marketed LaCroix as a women’s drink,” handing it out at women’s sporting events and partnering with Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It has male fans, too, but men make only sporadic appearances in La Croix’s hyper-feminine Instagram account, which features plenty of flower crowns, millennial pink nail polish and a “La Croix Over Boys” T-shirt.
“This is a trend right now, and every trend leaves and there’s another trend,” says Pietro Quaglia, owner of New York City’s all-pink restaurant Pietro Nolita. But pink, he believes, is eternal.
“This millennial concept, I don’t really get it. Yes, it’s cool now, but … pink has been around longer than that.”
What color will be next? According to industry-watchers, all bets are on purple.
