Power-C. Vital-T. Charge. XXX.
A few years ago, the above list might have appeared as a randomly generated string of vaguely energy-related words and letters. Today, however, such labels align themselves against a list of those increasingly notorious obstacles in the path of the culturally elite: Hangovers. Vitamin Deficiency. The Common Cold.
I had been putting off committing my thoughts on Vitamin Water to paper until I watched tonight’s episode of Gossip Girl, Josh Schwartz’s teen-Manhattanite drama on the CW. Gossip Girl follows a set of wealthy Upper East Siders as they navigate a sea of sex, drugs, and privilege, and struggle with such questions as how to date outside your borough and still maintain healthy relationships at home. In tonight’s episode, Brooklynite Jenny walks into a café to find her pseudo-business partner and reckless model friend Agnes wolfing down rainbow-hued bottles of Vitamin Water as though it were actual water. And maybe you’ll argue that it is, kind of. But we’ll get to that.
Anyway, Gossip Girl has always been a vehicle for aggressive Vitamin Water branding. In Central Park, elite private school students Nate and Dan stop at a food cart on which the Vitamin Waters are displayed more prominently than the hot dogs. A vivid, magenta bottle of “Defense” provides contrast for Chuck’s crisp, white suit at a charity event. Gossip Girl alone puts forth Vitamin Water as the beverage of choice for the upwardly mobile, urban sophisticate with a distinct hipster flare.
My gripe with Vitamin Water, however, is not that it overuses product placement. My gripe with the line of vitamin-infused beverages produced by Glaceau is more of a bewilderment than a gripe, really. I can’t even begin to comprehend how it got so cool.
Granted, if you visit Glaceau’s Vitamin Water website you will encounter some of the most aesthetically pleasing flash web design that is out there today. Glaceau’s use of white space alone is breathtaking. But up until now, the seriously cool youths among us have never responded so enthusiastically to that which is objectively cool in an aesthetic sense. PBR, trucker hats, riding boots: none of these things are exactly shiny and sleek, and none of them rely on expert advertisers and web designers in order to sell. And yet, they’re losing ground to Vitamin Water at such hipster enclaves as Sarah Lawrence College.
Why? Vitamin Water won’t help you lose weight, so we can’t explain its appeal as the cooler, tastier cousin of Diet Coke. A typical bottle of Vitamin Water (we’ll look at “Endurance,” the peach-mango variety) contains about 125 calories and 39 grams of sugar. A twelve-ounce can of Coca Cola, by comparison, contains 140 calories and 39 grams of sugar. But society has never warned us that Vitamin Water will rot our teeth.
I hesitate to reveal this somewhat incriminating information because my goal here is not to turn people against Vitamin Water, or make readers feel nervous and guilty the next time they pick up a bottle of “Endurance.” But I think Vitamin Water’s nutrition label is an important example of why I’m so confused about the brand’s popularity amongst hipsters and young yuppies. Chic branding and mostly unpronounceable vitamin supplements don’t explain why Vitamin Water is any cooler than, for instance, Gatorade, and it doesn’t explain why nobody in the room bats an eyelash when the cracked-out blond, sitting cross-legged on her apartment floor, tells me that “[her] favorite flavor is the lemonade one.”
So at this point, I can only conclude that Gossip Girl and other shows like it are doing a highly successful campaign for an otherwise dowdy bottled beverage. If those modish girls and boys, heavily weighed down with their black eyeliner and wire-rimmed glasses, stopped for a moment to read the label on their bottle of “Revive,” would they notice that the promotional blurb is hokey and unfunny? Can our generation’s obsession with Vitamin Water be explained by bad cafeteria coffee and aggressive anti-soda messages from our parents and physicians?
It’s possible that we’ll never know. In the meantime, however, I would urge people to keep drinking whatever tastes good, and to keep turning to Vitamin Water for its alleged medicinal value after a long night of drinking. Just keep in mind that the recent explosion of popularity this beverage has experienced is driven almost entirely by the advertising market, which has once again succeeded in directing youthful attention arbitrarily this way and that.