My review of Vitamin Water Ice
Originally published July 20, 2019
After walking the length of MSP’s Humphrey Terminal scouring Hudson News refrigerators and coffee shop coolers, it became clear to me that Gatorade is not a product available in this sector of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The last time I was in a similar situation I drank a blue Powerade which left me feeling fairly dehydrated and congested, almost as if I’d drank a 7-Up. I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to go for a Vitamin Water today. The airport newsstand had a pretty large selection of Glacéau Vitamin Waters, probably 9 or 10 different flavors, all of them basically new to me (though I was really only familiar with Power C and XXX beforehand). Now if you know me you probably know that I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to sports drinks, but I’m also sort of a purist. For me, there’s really only Gatorade, I’m hard-pressed to find something that I’d rather have. And today I sort of reinforced this belief with the Vitamin Water I tried which, spoiler alert, left me… a little unsettled, if not all-out disappointed. Before I get ahead of myself, I believe the flavor I selected is called “ice.” I chose this one because I remember the ad campaign for it a couple of months back. Boston’s MBTA system; trains and stations alike, were plastered with various Vitamin Water ads, each promoting a different flavor under the guise of advertising a different, fictitious product. One flavor promoted a movie, one a phone service, one a rapper called Yung Rind, who looked like if Zac Efron had auditioned for James Franco’s character in Spring Breakers. I found the campaign to be pretty corny, humorless and distracting on my daily commute, but to Glacéau’s credit, it commanded attention, and I doubt I’ll ever forget about it.
Upon examining the bottle itself, I found that the design to be so cluttered with slogans and words that it became sort of hard to tell what it is I was actually drinking. On the top of the label, it says “ice” and right below that, we get the flavor info; “cool blueberry-lavender,” (we’ll get into this in a bit) and below this, it says “frozen tundra” and then in tiny letters in parentheses, “(my ex’s heart)” and then finally in the biggest font (except for the VW logo itself) it says “-2,200°.” Oh and then under that, it gives a little weather forecast for the weekend with each day’s prediction: -2200. Needless to say, this label is a mess, the aesthetic is unrefined and just sort of wacky looking. All the text is lowercase, and there’s an odd mix of vertical and horizontal lines happening, the whole thing ends up looking almost utilitarian. The graphic of the blue snowflake makes the label look like it belongs on a winter survival kit rather than a sleek and hip sports drink. Beyond this, the number of thematic elements at work here is astonishing. “my ex’s heart” stands out here as being the factor that dumps Vitamin Water ice into the pool of total chaos. I found myself at a loss trying to connect these broad ideas of coldness to one another. From the heartbroken ex-lover, to the unbearably freezing cold front ahead of us, to the frozen tundra, to blueberry and lavender.
One change that I noticed since the last time I had a Vitamin Water, some 5 or 6 years ago, is that they’ve forgone the paragraph or so of text that described the flavor and mission of the drink. But I’ve found they have replaced this practice with a much more conceptual and complex one. A quick google search of my Vitamin Water revealed that Glacéau has set up a website inspired by Vitamin Water ice. It’s called The Ex Museum (theexmuseum.com sadly no longers exists and redirects to Vitamin Water’s homepage). I cannot confirm but I would imagine there’s a sibling website for each of the flavors in Vitamin Water’s new line. The website showcases a virtual museum gallery with six (6) works by an artist credited as Tommy Lavender. The works’ medium is video, each is an animation that lasts about 15-20 seconds and features narration from Mr. Lavender. It’s not clear if the narrations are meant to be part of the work as they certainly are unlike most artist statements and more in the vein of prose. Lavender’s narrations lament bygone relationships, touching on subjects like regret, revenge, isolation, and cold. Ice, glass, and mirrors are heavily featured motifs in the work. Lavender utters poetic lines with built-in one-liners such as “You’ve been iced out, without possibility of re-entry,” “A selfie is not just a hideous portmanteau [I believe Tommy means ‘tableau’] but an ice-cold act of revenge,” and my personal favorite “This week’s forecast shows cold isolating distance with a chance of never speaking to you again.” So Vitamin Water is sort of able to tie in the weather forecast thing, but the prediction of exactly -2,200° (Fahrenheit or Celsius is not specified) for the foreseeable future remains a mystery. Aiming to connect to the cold elements that ice’s bottle presents, The Ex Museum seems only to make them more disparate.
The descriptions of the videos seem also to have been written by Lavender (rather than a Glacéau-hired curator) and he’s taken some liberties with his listing of mediums, a couple of examples of which are “graphic display on frozen screen,” “Ice sculpture on pool of memories lost,” and “Frozen tears on glass.” These pieces’ mediums tear some holes in Glacéau’s bizarre attempt at poking fun at any given art movement and Vitamin Water’s larger concept here. Firstly, I have to ask, what is the art? The mediums’ surreal nature inhibits us from believing that these could be any type of tangible works. Are the pieces the 20-second videos themselves? Or are they what the videos depict, cold animated spaces decorated to be reminiscent of heartbreak? If this is the case, are we—Vitamin Water drinkers—to pretend as though these multimedia spaces could possibly exist physically? And how can we overlook the 3D animation vaporwave look of these videos? Another immovable layer in what is already one of the most thematically challenging, dense, and unintelligible marketing campaigns in the history of sports drinks. If Vitamin Water thinks they can get away with this haphazard, messy jab at the world of art and still maintain this facade of the hipster, underdog healthy beverage brand, they are sorely mistaken.
I wish I could say that my first sip of Vitamin Water ice was anything but underwhelming. Despite their re-branding and wacky marketing, it seems that the people over at Vitamin Water have neglected to put effort into creating an exciting beverage. I found the blueberry flavor to be overwhelming and artificial, lacking any type of nuance (for reference, it bore a strong resemblance to the flavor profile of SoBe Lifewater). It also completely overshadowed the hints of lavender that I don’t even know if I’d have noticed had I not read the label. Vitamin Water’s choice to include lavender was unique and exciting, and I’m heartbroken to see that they’ve allowed it to take a backseat to the simple candy-like blueberry flavor. I felt as Tommy Lavender might feel upon learning that his cold-hearted ex-girlfriend quickly found a rebound lover after the breakup that left Tommy in pieces. Perhaps this was Glacéau’s intention here and I’ve completely misread the level of nuance in the intrigue that surrounds this drink. Maybe the intention is in fact to create a realm of flavor that aims to replicate the sensation that Tommy Lavender experienced as he watched his frigid ex zoom by in the passenger’s seat of Danny Blueberry’s shiny blue convertible. The subtle and sensitive lavender flavor is dissolved and forgotten like so many teardrops in a ‘pool of memories lost.’
But lavender isn’t the only component erased in ice. Like all Vitamin Water, ice’s flavors--blueberry and lavender alike-- shy from every sip, the fruity sweetness second to the hyper-present watery mouthfeel that we may choose to believe is filled with various B vitamins. This is VW’s fatal flaw. Their choice to market their drinks as ‘water’ beverages doom them to be eternally unable to unite the flavor with the flavorless.
Still, the biggest disappointment was the lack of ‘coldness’ I’d anticipated. ice certainly isn’t aiming for ‘refreshing’ here, which the idea of blueberry might suggest. But nothing about the artificial nature of the flavor is cooling or refreshing, let alone icy. Perhaps the inclusion of citrus, mint, even cucumber might have helped to affirm the avalanche of Siberian frostbite that the bottle’s forecast told me I was in for.
All this being said, I have to give them points for the sheer density of the narrative present here, despite its poor construction and miserably 1-dimensional protagonist, the whole thing is alluring and sort of fun. ice itself is far from ‘gross’ and the lightness here offers a far superior alternative to any gooey Powerade flavor. And Glacéau is certainly giving us something to work with here. Any open-minded experimenters out there could easily find ice as an interesting foundation for a mixed drink. I think that half a glass of Vitamin Water ice topped with a dry white wine could result in something very unique and refreshing. The wateriness of VW leaves room for something with more of a bite, maybe a splash of ginger kombucha, garnished with a slice of lime or sprig of mint.
Yet ultimately, this drink is an unequivocal flop. The taste lacks about as much depth as Tommy Lavender, and conversely, Lavender’s art feebly mirrors the drink’s shallow pockets of flavor. But the real failure is Vitamin Water’s grand unveiling of how out of touch the company really is. As we wipe the frost from Vitamin Water’s pseudo-pragmatic chic bottle, the label’s proclamation of “Nutrient enhanced water beverage” seems to shift into a desperate, frost-bound cry of “How do you do, fellow kids?” As VW attempts to skim the surface of the pool of millennial and gen Z culture, the water freezes before their bottle can fill. And thus ice is born, a superficial examination of a cliché’d archetype from the sports drink whose cold take we are least interested in, frozen on arrival.
3/10
