It happened on a Tuesday, during a dinner party I was hosting for a few influential friends in the post-dairy milk alternative space. I was pouring a biodynamic, unfiltered orange wine into one of Sophie Lou Jacobsen’s iconic, pastel-pink rippled wine glasses. You know the ones. For three years, these colorful, squiggly chalices have been the undisputed protagonists of our tablescapes, practically begging to be photographed in direct afternoon sunlight. But as the cloudy liquid hit the whimsical, wavy rim of the glass, I felt a sudden, profound exhaustion wash over me. I looked at the glass, then at my guests, and realized: we are living a lie, and we are drinking from melted clown shoes.
There is something deeply infantilizing about forcing ourselves to consume our daily hydration from a vessel that looks like a piece of novelty candy. During the darkest days of the early 2020s, we bought these glasses to find a moment of peace. We convinced ourselves that a neon-green stem adorned with three asymmetrical glass bubbles was a legitimate expression of our resilient inner child. We told ourselves that drinking water didn't have to be a chore; it could be a dopamine hit. We bought the pink coupes. We bought the amber tumblers. We arranged them on open shelving so our Zoom backgrounds would communicate that we were fun, creative people who did not fear color.
But the era of the Instagram-friendly wavy glass is over, and it has left us morally bankrupt. We could not buy a house, so we bought a $60 hand-blown squiggle. We could not fix the global supply chain, so we supported local artisans who made glassware that looks like it belongs in a cartoon about a whimsical frog. I remember attending a panel on sustainable design in Milan—because I make it a point to stay connected to the actual discourse—and listening to a prominent architect discuss how the home should be a sanctuary. I nodded along, holding my complimentary sparkling water in a vessel so aggressively fluted it was physically painful to grip. It was in that moment I realized the sanctuary had become a playground, and we were all trapped in the sandbox.
And let us not ignore the silent, domestic tragedy of maintaining these objects. Have you ever tried to hand-wash a fragile, asymmetrical glass loop attached to a coupe? It is a high-stakes surgical procedure. You stand over the sink, sponge in hand, sweating, terrified that the slightest miscalculation in pressure will shatter your personality trait into a thousand pastel shards. We have willingly invited this stress into our homes under the guise of aesthetic enrichment. We are paying a premium to be terrorized by our own dishware.
It turns out I am not alone in my fatigue. Even Sophie Lou Jacobsen herself—the very architect of our collective pastel delusion—has recently admitted to the press that she is craving something else. When the creator of the squiggly glass is desperately searching for the exit to the funhouse, it is time for the rest of us to stop pretending we are enjoying the ride. Jacobsen knows what we are all too cowardly to admit: the maximalist glassware trend was a substitute for actual emotional regulation.
To understand the full scope of our aesthetic failure, I reached out to one of the leading voices in contemporary object theory, hoping she could articulate the trauma we have collectively endured at the hands of these colorful cups.
The colorful rippled glass was a perfectly fine product design moment that resonated well on social media, but no one is forcing you to build your entire identity around a blue cup. It’s just a cup. You can just put it in the cabinet.
Exactly. We allowed a blue cup to hold our identities hostage. We became prisoners to the aesthetic demands of our own cupboards. Dr. Vance understands the insidious nature of the trend: the rippled glass didn't just sit in our cabinets; it colonized our minds. It forced us to curate a vibe at 7:00 a.m. while we were just trying to swallow our daily supplements.
I recently brought this up in an email thread with my peers, suggesting we all transition immediately to heavy, brutalist, perfectly cylindrical clear glasses that require a firm, two-handed grip to lift. I explained that I was instituting a new era of aesthetic austerity, one where our objects do not attempt to be our friends. The silence was deafening. One friend, a creative director at a boutique dog-walking agency, accused me of being needlessly bleak. Another simply replied with a link to a $65 lilac-colored glass straw shaped like a flamingo.
My friends are simply not ready to face the void without a squiggle-shaped safety net. They are still clinging to the illusion that a colorful rim will somehow save them from the crushing weight of modern adulthood. But I have moved on. I have packed away my pastel coupes and my amber tumblers.
Last night, I poured myself a glass of tap water. I used a perfectly cylindrical, transparent glass that weighs nearly four pounds empty. It has absolutely no sense of humor. It does not look good in the afternoon light. It is brutal. It is unyielding. It is honest. When I lift it to my mouth, I am acutely aware of the gravity of the earth and the seriousness of hydration. Frankly, it’s time we put away our glass toys, stopped trying to romanticize our hydration, and started drinking like adults who know the world is ending.