“Pink Sauce” is the next phase in an internet culture that has privileged aesthetics over work for years.
*Jessica Maddox
In recent weeks, a sauce has dominated TikTok. It was simply called “Pink Sauce” and created by a chef with the TikTok username of Chef Pii. after saying that she couldn’t describe the taste of the saucethe product launched on July 1, and people could buy a bottle online for $20. site revealed the ingredients: water, sunflower seed oil, pure honey, distilled vinegar, garlic, pitaya, pink Himalayan salt, dry spices, lemon juice, milk and citric acid.
The problems started when the orders arrived. The color was off and the sauces were lighter or darker than advertised on Pii’s website. When the bottles were opened, some exploded and some had odors fortes. Nutrition labels were misspelled and stated that a bottle included 444 servings of the sauce. Concerned chefs jumped into the TikTok rant, indicating that the expanding bottles could carry the bacteria that causes botulism. Also, although milk was listed as an ingredient, Pink Sauce not shipped in refrigerated packagingduring a heat wave covering much of the US.
It is still unclear whether Pink Sauce has been registered with the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration), an American agency that monitors the distribution of condiments. Pii says who is now working with the FDA.
Pink Sauce was an elaborate condiment for social media. It was bright and beautiful and mysterious and part of an image and a mystery. On the one hand, Pink Sauce fits the ideal social media aesthetic: bright, beautiful and makes any simple food stand out.”pop”. Chef Pii promised the sauce was “sweet and spicy”. It was beautiful and yielded interesting content, both in terms of “unboxing” (content made by influencers that consists of unpacking recently purchased products) and videos answering the mystery about the flavor. Some users stated that the sauce has “taste of sweet ranch sauce”.
@realcarsonwerner Pink sauce is SKETCHY #pinksauce #pinksaucereview #viral ♬ original sound – Carson Werner
Pink Sauce could also be a sign that we’ve reached the next phase in an internet culture that has privileged aesthetics above all else for years.
In the last decade, the world was dominated by aesthetics”Instagrammable”. Cool travel photos, perfect selfies, and influencers living glamorous lifestyles were just some of the end results of this aesthetic. Internet expert Katrin Tiidenberg argues that the idea of something being “instagrammable” refers to “those aspects of platforms and applications that we perceive as something possible to do”.
Companies, brands and artists also joined. The second half of the 2010s saw a proliferation of activities “made for instagram”: selfies of Infinity Mirror Rooms exhibition by Yayoi Kusama, goat yoga and, of course, food”instagrammable”. Food media scholar Emily Contois said that in the 2010s, Instagram influenced big aspects of the food industry, from presentation to restaurant lighting. Then there were the dishes themselves – marshmallow flowers that bloom in hot chocolate, crazy milkshakes, cookie dough cups .
The search for food”instagrammable” was reinforced by press. The food section of New York Times dedicated a few column pages and your own social media posts to what was popular on Instagram – taking the popular, the new and the strange, making them intelligible to the general population. In the process of demystifying digital cultural trends, the press also reinforces this.
Pink Sauce exists at the intersection of aesthetics”instagrammable”, from the virality of the internet and the economics of side hustle. But Pink Sauce was born out of TikTok, not Instagram, and the platform matters. TikTok is not Instagram and Instagram is not TikTok (even if it wants to be). Many of the users most popular on TikTok avoided the perfection of Instagram influencers, privileging rawness, foolishness and mistakes of Photoshop, Glamor and Beauty. As content creators look for additional sources of income to neutralize the platforms’ precarious financial systemsseveral products such as Pink Sauce will still emerge in this scenario.
*Jessica Maddox is an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. She researches internet culture, social media platforms and content creators.
Text translated by Natália Veloso. Read the original at English.
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