Perhaps you see coffee as equal parts art project and beverage. Like oil paint or gouache, it's a medium for making pictures of grumpy cat and Minions. Or if you fancy yourself more of an Impressionist, perhaps your beverage is designed to capture the soft-focus pastel magic of a unicorn. Or if you're an abstract artist, maybe this green, vaguely tree-shaped pile of whipped cream passes for a Christmas tree.
But now latte artists have a new material to work with: Edible glitter is popping up in coffee cups around the globe. The sparkly stuff adds pixie dust to an otherwise ordinary froth of steamed milk, and with a little food coloring, it can make a drink look like a shimmering jewel.
View this post on InstagramFriday #Mood with our Diamond Cappuccino 🌿☕️ #CoffeeByDiBella #CBD #DiBella
A post shared by Coffee By Di Bella Ⓡ (@coffeebydibella) on
That's in the eye of the beholder, of course. For the many people who hate glitter, this is just another way of ruining coffee, a perfectly respectable drink without need for embellishment. "If you get it on you, be prepared to have it on you forever," the comedian Demetri Martin once quipped about the substance. "Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies." It joins our long list of foods that exist mainly for their Instagrammability. (See also: sushi doughnuts, cloud eggs, cheese tea, blue wine, charcoal pizza. I could keep going.)
The trend has been credited to the Mumbai coffee shop Coffee by Di Bella, which began serving its "diamond" and "gold" varieties of the drink to customers this fall. For obvious reasons, it's been popular on Instagram, so it skipped over to the United Kingdom, where cafes in London and Scotland are now offering the drink. The European coffee chain Costa is selling "sparkle coffee" as a special promotion this week. And now, glitter is gaining ground in the United States and Mexico, where a number of independent coffee shops have begun to offer it as an add-on. One of them is Crema Coffee and More, a pop-up coffee shop in Pinellas Park, Florida, owned by April Hall. She got the idea from looking at the elaborate work of cake decorators, and applied those principles to coffee.
