When did we become so obsessed with drinking water?

We've hit peak status water bottle

While drinking water has always been a necessity, our cultural obsession with trendy water bottles has grown dramatically in recent years. Elfy Scott investigates why. 

Stanley Quencher Cups have been making a lot of headlines recently. The insulated tumblers with their signature straws have become a viral sensation that has led to people (quite literally) camping out to secure new releases.

Videos posted on social media show crowds racing through stores to get their hands on limited-release designs of the bottle. Adoring videos show people demonstrating all of the accessories available to purchase with their Stanley cups, including charms to dangle off the handles and plastic characters that wrap around the straws. Cupboards displaying Stanley cups in every colourway have become a status symbol for American wellness influencers. 

Stanley is a Seattle-based brand that was established over a century ago and was previously making around $US70 million annually for its range of lunchboxes and thermoses. However, the hype around the Stanley Quencher Cup has seen a huge boost in sales for the company over the past four years and last year alone Stanley was projected to rake in $US750 million. 

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While the overwrought fixation on Stanley cups is a relatively new phenomenon, the obsession with water bottles and the commercialisation of hydration has been happening for years. Of course, drinking water has always been entirely necessary for, well, staying alive, but the cultural obsession with drinking water has grown dramatically in recent times – so where did it come from? 

While there are a few different theories, it’s been posited that this all started back in the 1980s with Gatorade’s sports drinks campaigns, which started people thinking about how hydration could affect our overall ‘performance’.

Then, in the early 2000s, a spate of academic papers were published about hydration, largely focused on the benefits of drinking more water and how much anybody should actually be drinking. Despite a lot of conflicting evidence emerging from these studies (for example, nobody can really agree on how much water we should be drinking), it was then that hydration seemed to enter the popular consciousness in a big way. 

The hype around the Stanley Quencher Cup has seen a huge boost in sales for the company. Image: Stanley

The commercial opportunities to sell branded bottled water exploded and consumers began reaching for bottles of water over soft drinks, juice, or sports drinks. Hydration has become synonymous, not only with basic health but with the supposed success of people’s lives in general.

As Catherine LeClair wrote in the New York Times in 2021, water has become imbued with the powers of a “mysterious elixir” – “Feeling sluggish? You probably need more water. Uninspired and utterly hopeless about your career and romantic prospects? Well, have you had any water today? People hydrate as if their reputations depend on it.” 

The cultural obsession with hydration has, in turn, led to massive sales of water bottles that provide a sustainable alternative to buying disposable plastic water bottles (although if one person is buying five Stanley cups in different colours, the sustainability does get slightly questionable). The ‘emotional support water bottle’ has become an essential accessory for women and brands like Frank Green, Yeti, and S’Well have dominated the market in Australia. 

Professor Lauren Ball from the School of Public Health at the University of Queensland, says that the trend is obvious and she can see a clear generational divide in the way that people are consuming water. 

“When you see a patient or a client who is maybe older than say, the age of 45, they’re not used to carrying around water bottles, it’s not something that they grew up with and as a kid, they would have just used the bubbler or had a drink of water with a cup,” Professor Ball says. 

The ‘emotional support water bottle’ has become an essential accessory for women. Image: Pexels

While it is possible to drink water to excess, Professor Ball maintains that overall, the trend of being aware of hydration and carrying a water bottle is a positive one, as it makes drinking water convenient and accessible. 

There are distinct benefits to being well-hydrated, including improved cognitive function, such as focus and memory, improved sleep quality, growth for children, improved digestion, and even reducing the acidic environment in your mouth to protect teeth. 

However, Professor Ball notes that the obsession with hydration is popular mostly among higher socioeconomic brackets in Australia and there are still a lot of families who are choosing juice or soft drinks for their kids over water.

Professor Ball says that the prohibitive price of these cult water bottles could be an issue, which is something to be aware of from a public health standpoint. She says that for those who can afford them, there is limited harm in participating in this trend, even if fighting over water bottles in stores is incredibly silly behaviour. 

“I’m thinking the main harm is the ridiculous nature of spending $90 on a water bottle. But if you put that to one side, if this means more people are drinking water, then that’s ultimately a good thing.” 

Originally published as When did we become so obsessed with drinking water?