It’s funny how a cup-clear, with a green hat and Starbucks logo, wrapped with a holiday bow can cause so much chaos. How people would wake up at 3am to wait outside of their local Starbucks until it opened to buy the infamous cup. The Starbucks Bear cup is not just a seasonal collectable, it’s a performance. A performance in wanting to match an aesthetic that it promises at $30, and an early wake up call.
When I first saw the bear cup, I thought it was adorable. The little bear face and the green hat drew me in, and I wanted the cup. Unfortunately, I was not able to buy the bear cup, but it was of my own free will. First, I was not willing to wake up at 3am to go to my nearest Starbucks. I am typically a night owl, but I did not want to wake up at 3am if I had an 8am class the same morning. And second, there are so many other bear cups out there. I could easily find another cup of the same design on amazon for much cheaper and I did not think it was worth spending $30 on it. While thinking about my own thoughts about the bear cup, I thought about one thing. We don’t just want the cup- we want what it says about us.
It is the chaos of aesthetics. Of spending tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars on material goods just so we can fit into a category. It is the way that capitalism disguises consumption as self-expression. How beauty becomes both a rebellion and obedience. How the act of wanting something aesthetic becomes our personality. Do we want the Starbucks Bear cup, or do we want the validation of having it?
Cuteness has always been powerful, but in the age of social media, it has turned into a full-fledged economy. The bear cup did not go viral just because of its cuteness, it was because it represented an entire aesthetic fantasy. The illusion of a life so curated it could fit into a Pinterest board. If you had the cup, you are that girl. The girl who plans the cutest outfits for winters, orders the same holiday drink every morning, and has her life put together. We want to buy the cup, not just to use it, but express ourselves through the cup. The bear cup has become a status symbol not because it was rare, but because it was recognizable. Now people all over the internet are selling the cup for thousands of dollars, trying to get people to buy the cup for ridiculous prices.
Aesthetics create individual hierarchies. The girl who woke up at 3am to buy the cup is “dedicated” but the girl who bought a dupe through amazon is “cheating” and the one who didn’t care is “uneducated.” This unfair system assigns that wanting something becomes our personality trait; buying becomes a source of meaning and connection.
While the Bear cup is about Starbucks, there are other complex layers that make it more about the act. It is how we navigate identity in a world where everything, even a glass bear cup, becomes a symbol. Maybe real chaos isn’t the aesthetic of the bear cup itself, but the quiet truth behind it. That we are searching for something that makes us belong-and sometimes it’s easier to buy that feeling than build it.