I Bought A Pink Stanley Cup So You Don’t Have To: Here’s what I thought of it…
I bought a pink Stanley cup so you don’t have to. Should you, though?
Because I am basic, I bought a Stanley Quencher.
A pink one, naturally.
(Well, OK, a rose one if you want to be pedantic about it….)
It cost me £50 (In my defense, I had an Amazon voucher, so it was technically free, but still…) and took 2 weeks to arrive from America, after a three-week-long waiting list. (I should add here that I bought my Stanley cup back in the summer, when the Quencher was already the focus of a kazillionty-one TikTok videos in the US, but had yet to really take off here in the UK. So I’m definitely a mindless follower of cup-based TikTok trends, but I’m not quite as much of one as I’d be if I’d bought it this month, when people have literally been fighting over the things. Fighting. Over cups. What a start to the year, people! How could you even begin to follow that? But I digress…)
Every so often during those 5 long weeks of anticipation, I would log onto my Amazon account, and I would wonder if I should cancel the order before it could be dispatched. “Is it worth it, Amber?” I asked myself, imagining I sounded a bit like Taylor Swift in “Should’ve Said No“. “Is it really worth it?” (Note: I had to get my Quencher from the US because that was the only option at the time. You can now order them –– when they’re in stock –– from Amazon UK, and they’ll apparently also soon be available from here…)
But then the glorious day came. The package arrived, and I proudly carried it up to the office.
“This is literally going to change my life,” I told my bemused husband, who just wanted to get back to work. “This is IT. The moment I’ve been waiting for. My life will be changed by a giant pink cup.”
“I mean, if you say so,” said Terry, turning back to his screen. And, the thing is, he had reason to be cynical here, because I do this kind of thing a lot. I think it’s because I’m perpetually waiting for my life to change, and it’s so tempting to allow myself to be convinced that buying stuff is an easy way to do it.
I bought the pink Stanley cup, for instance, because I became obsessed with watching people’s Morning Routine videos on TikTok, all of which seem to be made by these impossibly glamorous, model-like women, who live in million pound apartments, and wake up at 5am every morning to go to the gym.
When these women get out of bed (Which is always positioned next to a floor-to-ceiling window, looking directly onto Tower Bridge or something), the first thing they always do is go to fill their Stanley Quencher. One woman even had a cupboard in her apartment which had JUST Stanley Quenchers in it. And they were all arranged by colour, so she could coordinate her Stanley cup with her outfit.
“That’s it,” I thought feverishly. “That’s the life for me.” And while I knew I would never have the swanky apartment or the ability to get up at 5am for anything other than a flight, I COULD have the giant mug. Because I AM a giant mug, basically. And I had been well and truly influenced.
Should you let yourself be influenced like this, though? Or, to put it another way…
Is it REALLY worth spending £50 on a giant pink Stanley cup of your own? Or is it just another stupid TikTok trend that will soon die off?
It’s a bit of both, really. (Which is helpful, no?) On the one hand, the pink Stanley cup is absolutely just a stupid TikTok trend: and not only is it ALREADY dying off (I mean, you know a trend is over when I’m on board with it, right?), there’s also now an equally-weird backlash to the trend, in which very earnest people get incredibly angry about the idea of people (most of who are women) buying giant pink cups. And, I mean, I get it. I do. (Well, OK, I don’t really. Because it’s pretty hard to imagine getting angry about a cup…) I will hold my hands up here and admit that it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to buy a huge reusable cup if TikTik hadn’t kept showing me videos of them. It just wouldn’t. Prior to June 2023, I wasn’t even thinking about cups, let alone considering joining a wait list for one. There was no giant cup-shaped hole in my life, and I’d be lying if I told you there was. (I’d also be really freaking weird, but that goes without saying…) I was not a Cup Person. I had no desire to be a Cup Person.
BUT.
Regardless of how and why I came to be the proud owner of a pink Stanley cup, I’d also be lying if I told you I didn’t LOVE the thing.
Because, the fact is, my cup is ACE. Seriously.
For one thing, it holds 1.2 litres of water, which is both significantly more water than I would otherwise drink in a day (Because I am a dried-up old husk of a person, who survives on coffee and wine) AND significantly less water than I’m really supposed to drink in a day. Until I got my Quencher, no matter how many times I told myself I’d definitely start drinking more water, I never, ever managed to do it: a fact that I now firmly believe was caused by the absence of a big enough –– and, crucially, PINK enough –– cup in my life. Let’s face it: I am basic AND shallow. I like things that look nice. I like having a cup that matches my computer. (Yes, I am also the kind of person who has a pink computer. I mean, OF COURSE I am…) I realize there are plenty of people in the world who feel I should be relentlessly mocked for this, and who will try to imply that it somehow makes me less of a person than they are, with their non-cup-related interests, but… meh. I’m a published author. I have a degree. I read the news. I’m interested in plenty of things that aren’t pink OR cups. And, yeah, I also like matching my stationery to my travel mug, and I don’t really care what you think about that, to be honest…
Anyway.
So, I got my pink mug, and I started taking it everywhere with me, even though it made me feel a lot like the woman in this video:
@brynnhudsonjewelry #fyp #viral #trending #parenting #moms #funny #trendingreel #viralreel #hilarious #marriage #marriedlife #comedy #humor #momhumor #explore #explorepage #comedy #foryourpage #comedyreels #comedyvideos #jewelry #goldjewelry #fashionmom #amazonfasfion #amazon #betches #girls #memes #funnymemes
The first thing that happened as a result of this was that I started drinking a lot more water, almost without thinking about it.
The second thing that happened was that people kept commenting admiringly on my giant pink Stanley cup, and asking me where I got it, and, honestly, that was quite nice, too. “WHOA!” they would say. “That’s a GIANT cup! Where did you get THAT?” And, “Amazon, £50,” I would reply sheepishly. “But you have to search for it for ages, then wait 5 weeks.”
And, just like that, I became a Cup Person.
Would I want to have an entire cupboard full of Stanley Quenchers, in different colours, like the TikTok Girls, though? Absolutely, yes. I mean, NO! No, of course not! Because, of course, the whole point of the Stanley Quencher is that you only need one. It is an eco-friendly cup-for-life, and a large part of the backlash to the Quencher trend comes from the fact that buying TONS of the things is exactly the kind of competitive over-consumption that’s killing the planet, and is thus to be avoided no matter HOW good they look in your kitchen.
So I’m good with just the one pink Stanley cup, thanks. Je ne regrette rien. And the good news for those of you who hate them is that now that I have one, the trend is surely well and truly over…
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