Performative hydration has gone too far
How did water get so entangled with "self-care" culture?
Kelly Stranick, a mid-tier wellness influencer living in New York, begins her day at 6:30 a.m. She then hits the gym, walks her dog, curls her hair … and mixes a picture-perfect glass of rose-colored water.
This water — "sexy water" — is Stranick's calling card. Since coining the term at some point last year, she has made the invention of complex, "functional" waters a pillar of her burgeoning TikTok account. Last week, she broke into the mainstream when Women's Wear Daily wrote up the trend. Stories in Popsugar and The New York Post followed: Our cups runneth over with hydration fads.
For me, "sexy water" confirmed a hunch I've nursed for several months. Performative hydration is out of control — it's wellness run amok. Look to the Stanley craze that dominated whole news cycles this winter, or Liquid Death's recent billion-dollar valuation. Last year, WaterTok (sexy water, but for the middle class) provoked a minor moral panic among nutritionists.
Social media overflows with exhortations to hydrate: for your skin, your sanity, your energy, your immunity, your metabolism, your kidney function, your overall wellness.
When, I ask, did drinking water become such a goddamn production?
“What if it all came down to water?”
Children of the '90s know that "water hacks" are nothing new. I grew up with Crystal Light packets in the pantry and recall my mother's brief affection for flat, flavored water. A decade earlier, Perrier conquered America on the strength of Jane Fonda, whose wildly popular aerobics videos drove a desire "not just to be healthy, but to be seen to be healthy." (My italics.) Drinking certain water has long been linked, in other words, to aspirations of health and fitness.
But "wellness," as both a personal practice and a performance, exploded in the past 15 years. While the term stretches back before that, observers trace the modern iteration to the late 2000s, a period that conveniently saw both the introduction of the first true smartphone and the collapse of the American financial system. Newly insecure about their long-term prospects, and seeking ways to self-optimize in an uncertain world, a generation of young Americans turned to yoga, crossfit, bulletproof coffee, essential oils, yoni eggs, caveman diets … the works.
They also turned to water as they never had before: The forecasting firm WGSN claims 2011 is the year when water bottles transformed into fashion accessories. Since then, we've seen a parade of trendy bottles come and go — S'wells, Hydroflasks, Stanleys — each designed not for storage in a purse or gym bag, but for open (even ostentatious!) carrying.
It's not just water bottles that blew up, either. In 2015, the long-languishing Midwestern seltzer brand LaCroix took off thanks, in part, to wellness bloggers and influencers on the Whole 30 and paleo diets. Liquid Death, founded three years later, marketed itself as a "lifestyle brand" for straight-edge punk kids. In 2019, a widely-reshared Twitter account, called @drinkwaterslut, began reminding followers to, well … drink water. For a minute there, any unsuspecting Twitter scroll could yield a sudden "hydrate today, bitch" or "drink water now."
When this trend crossed the line from sustentative1 to performative is difficult to say. Surely many people swigged from S'wells and Hydroflasks because they felt actual, literal thirst. But I have to think we tipped into a different thirst entirely around the time that people began describing water as some kind of improbable, panacean cure.
Water became Instagram's go-to solution for break-outs, bloating, depression, stress and sluggishness. It could boost your immunity and "cleanse" your organs. Enough water could give you energy, rev your metabolism, make you more productive. Hydration became entangled with skincare routines, girl-bossy self-care and trendy detoxes.
The comedians Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant pilloried this transformation in a 2020 episode of their podcast POOG: "What if all of the ways we chase health, the ways we chase optimization and beauty, what if it all came down to water? What if the powders and the creams and the lotions, and the jogging and the running and the yoga and the praying — what if it all means nothing?"
There's also a great comic by Sarah Andersen that depicts a woman with an escalating series of health problems, to which her off-screen companion repeatedly recommends hydration. (The woman understandably ends up on the ground, screaming, in the end.)
But for me, the whole affair most vividly evokes this brilliant art project called "Fake It Till You Make It," in which the artist Maya Man collected hundreds of words and phrases from feel-good text graphics and fed them into a generative language algorithm. The algorithm recombines the text into new graphics, which are simultaneously plausible and … deeply vapid.
Many "Fake It Till You Make It" posts recommend drinking water, alongside bubbly, pastel proclamations like "taking care of yourself is magnetic" and "dance in your transformation."
It's in a similar spirit that the global president of Stanley, speaking to InsideHook in 2021, claimed that hydration had become "a way of life" for the wellness generation. But it might be more accurate to say hydration is a vibe — an unquantifiable quality, a vague idea, a notion as liquid as water itself: It's health and wellness and style and fashion and "transformation" and "taking care of yourself."
Of Britas and brands
Part of me wonders if this isn't the future that public health advocates have long said they wanted. In 2013 and 2014 — around the time that today's 20-somethings were in secondary school — former First Lady Michelle Obama spearheaded a major public-private initiative, with a significant marketing presence in U.S. schools, designed to get Americans to switch from soda and other sugary beverages to water. Within five years, water was outselling all other bottles.
Performative hydration trends become troublesome, however, if they nudge people back to sugary drinks again — an impulse you often see in WaterTok's obsession with flavorings, syrups and other sweet add-ins. Commenting on Stranick's "sexy water," one nutritionist also warned Popsugar that loading your glass with minerals and supplements can also backfire if those ingredients interact with medications you're taking or interfere with your body's mineral absorption.
*My* concern is less nutritional than philosophical, however: There is something really shitty, and slightly sinister, in the deeply American impulse to rebrand a free, bountiful, communal thing as an exclusive luxury good. Water is an appealing wellness trend in large part because it's so widely available, but that shifts when you begin storing it in $45 tumblers or adding $50 "beauty" drops or snubbing the peasant institution of tap water all together.
In one recent "sexy water" video, Stranick — wearing a thematic wetsuit (?) — blends filtered water with six supplements and tinctures, which together retail for a whopping $264. Watching her pour water from her counter-top reverse-osmosis machine (which I price at an additional $300, at least), I'm reminded of the $18 Brita we bought last month while staying in an area where the tap water ran brownish and tasted muddy.
We're still using it now, back home in Buffalo, where officials casually stopped fluoridating the water without telling anyone. Other municipalities, needless to say, have even larger water problems: lead contamination, forever chemicals, agricultural pollution. A September article in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology found widespread contamination in many U.S. water systems.
None of this has anything to do with "sexy water" — and that is what makes "sexy water" so weird. (Arguably, there are few things less sexy than academic journals or fluoridation.) We live in a surreal, gilded era where people "ritualizing" the "chore" of hydration and people drinking poisoned tap water simply … coexist!
Are we supposed to reconcile that gap, I wonder, by (literally) buying into these rituals ourselves?
Further reading
"Come Drink from the Stanley Cup," by Anne Helen Peterson in (2024). This is a rare link I'm sharing without reading. WHY? Because it published after I drafted this. (Verbatim text to Jason: "I want to die.") I plan to read this in the discomfort of my home, after shipping my essay, so that I can't second-guess it too much. Or I can second-guess it, I guess, but without further delaying publication.
"Drinking Fountains: The Past and Future of Free Public Water in the United States," by Josselyn Invanov (Master's thesis, 2015)
"Liquid Assets: How the Business of Water Went Mad," by Sophie Elmhirst for The Guardian (2016)
"When Did Reusable Water Bottles Become A Status Symbol?" by Cait Munro for Refinery29 (2019)
"How Mormon Influencers Popularized the Stanley Tumbler," by me, here, in January
Weekend preview
I'm currently reading about Rust Belt climate havens, the legacy of Grindr, Andrew Huberman (… of course) and "little free Blockbusters." Fwiw, I'm also on an intensive Barbara Kingsolver kick and just began Unsheltered, which so far I rate as >Prodigal Summer but <my all-time fave, The Poisonwood Bible.
Until the weekend! Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
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Conflict-of-interest statement: The author owns a 32-ounce Wirecutter-recommended Takeya tumbler in canary yellow. She would like to note that she initially purchased the bottle for a long trip and selected this loud color because it was — understandably! — cheaper than the others.
It feels like a good idea to note somewhere that most people actually DON'T need to consume entire baby pools of water everyday … one exercise scientist told The Atlantic that young, healthy, desk-bound adults can generally just drink when they're thirsty. Also, I am 90% sure "sustentative" is a real word.
This was super fascinating, I loved it!! “Drink water u stupid bitch” feels like the 2024 virtue signalling equivalent to 2014’s “touch my butt and buy me pizza” 💧
You came for performative hydration and I (and my Stanley cup and camelbak and random swag water bottles with fancy stickers covering the logos) are here for it!