Advertising has always carried the promise that a better life is just a purchase away. Wellness brands in particular pound this maxim home—that with this help of one special product, we will finally become more beautiful, more vibrant, more balanced, more focused and productive. Of course, we’re inundated with enough ads at this point that we know the game. But every once in a while, a company comes along that sells us on something we should know better than to want. For me, that company was Kin Euphorics.
Kin Euphorics is a non-alcoholic alternative spirits company with 160,000 Instagram followers and an It Girl sign-on from its co-founder, model Bella Hadid. Its beverages are made with nootropics, substances purported to have cognitive benefits, and adaptogens, herbs or mushrooms that proponents claim can decrease stress and induce “homeostasis” in the body and mind. Branding-wise, Kin Euphorics is like Goop’s Gen Z daughter, a member of the same clique as other adaptogenic beverage brands like Recess, famous for their CBD-infused seltzers, and Moon Juice, best known for something called “Sex Dust.” From the influencer-friendly gradient backgrounds that adorn its cans to the company’s designer smoothie, available for a limited time at buzzy Los Angeles grocery store Erewhon, these pricey drinks ($57 for a 12-pack of 8-ounce cans on the Kin website) are a status symbol for the Emma Chamberlain fanatics among us.
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Two things about Kin Euphorics really sold me. The first was Hadid’s involvement. After all, she’s the woman whose candids launched a thousand mini-platform Uggs, which is to say: I trust her taste. The second reason I found Kin Euphorics so alluring had nothing to do with looking great in an Instagram carousel: it was the not-so-subtle implication that drinking all of this shit could give me some kind of buzz to tide me through Dry January. What else was I supposed to think, with all the talk about mushrooms and product descriptions like “melts in your mind” on the box of a drink called Actual Sunshine. Its mixer High Rhode promised to “help to elevate serotonin levels so you can access your inner strength and charm,” and “nurture neurotransmitters in charge of mood, ecstasy, and reward so you can find yourself a little more talkative, a little more charming and ready to connect.” Sounds like drugs to me!
After a few weeks without drinking alcohol, I was actively excited for my “Full Kin Kit”—a package containing four flavors of canned drinks and two bottles of mocktail mixers—to arrive. I didn’t expect to become a convert, but I did expect the drinks to provide… something. Spoiler alert: Nothing I drank from Kin Euphorics put me on “a sensorial journey towards enlivened peace,” like the Kin Spritz’s can suggested, or gave me the feeling of “naked forest bathing at midnight,” from the can of Kin’s Lightwave.
Mostly, the drinks just pissed me off.
I tried Kin’s canned beverages first, because they felt a little more casual than the mixers, which came in 16.9 oz glass bottles and were labeled as dietary supplements. I expected something herbaceous and weird. Maybe something exotic, like a cross between a maté and something probiotic and zingy like tepache, or something vaguely medicinal, like cough syrup and seltzer mixed with apple cider vinegar. What I got, in essence, was lightly carbonated juice.
Lightwave, a drink promising “grounding calm,” was an apple juice-based offering that tasted like Christmas with notes of fluoride, haunted by the ghost of carbonation past. My best guess is that it was supposed to be an amaro dupe. Actual Sunshine tasted like the pineapple juice that was its main ingredient with a subtle, metallic tinge—I think they were aiming for a mimosa. The absolute worst offender, which I couldn’t finish a can of, was the brand’s rosé substitute Kin Bloom, a mix of carbonated water and white grape juice concentrate that filled me with memories of Communion wine rather than “beaming joy.”
The only Kin product I could see myself purchasing again was the Kin Spritz, the Aperol spritz stand-in that delivered the only noticeable sensation I felt throughout the experiment: It tasted good, and more importantly, it had 50 milligrams of caffeine, so a couple cans worked as a coffee stand-in while I thrift shopped with a friend over the weekend. (Actual Sunshine has around 33 milligrams of caffeine per can too, but my fucked-up tolerance rendered this small amount undetectable.) The only beverage I full-stop declined to try was Kin’s “nightcap” mixer Dream Light, which is still sitting on my kitchen island. The bottle says it has “a kiss of melatonin,” 0.25 milligrams to be exact, and I do not want to mess with it.
To give Kin a spin in a truly social setting, I took the other bottle of mixer to a birthday party on Saturday night. The hostess lovingly crafted a mocktail for me with a few glugs of High Rhode, a splash of soda water, and a dried slice of blood orange. The drink was a handsome maroon color, and it looked great in my hand, but it tasted like nothing—like the ice I was using to chill it. I drank it quickly and then abandoned my cup for a can of black cherry seltzer my boyfriend brought. When I left the party a few hours later, I abandoned my mixer next to a slightly emptier bottle of its competitor Ghia with zero remorse.
Now, I didn’t drink coffee for the week I worked through Kin’s offerings, which might account for some of my negative impression of the fare. I also, I guess, could have stuck with it a while longer—apparently, it takes two to three weeks for an adaptogen regimen to really kick in and give off tangible effects. But if I wanted to reap the benefits of Kin ingredients like L-theanine, collagen, and reishi mushrooms, for cost reasons alone I’d opt for a supplement instead.
If anything, my commitment to trying Kin’s line of beverages made my Dry January even more arbitrarily restrictive than it already was—and that extra layer of complication was not something I needed at all. I checked off a lot of the things I wanted to accomplish with my month of alcohol abstinence: I got back into my workout routine, caught up on all the life maintenance tasks I neglected during the holidays, read more and ate less takeout in bed. None of that happened because of any fancy, well-branded herbal beverage, and after my experiment, I feel confident I’ll be just fine without them.
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