What is WaterTok? Why bizarre flavoured water is suddenly taking over TikTok

We all know it’s important to stay hydrated. But TikTokkers have taken the quest for hydration another step, many of us arguing it’s that fateful step too far. Enter WaterTok.

The word “WaterTok” has received over 97 million tags on TikTok, due to the increasingly viral trend of adding syrups and ice to your – you guessed it – water to make your drink more appealing, and therefore encourage us to drink more water.

It’s all a bit of fun, to a certain extent. The movement’s “founder” Taylor Pullan shared her “recipe” for her “Oklahoma sunset snowcone fun water” – which consisted of packets of strawberry and orange flavouring –  which must be drunk with ice out of an “emotional support water bottle”, in Pullan’s case a purple leopard-print tumbler, along with a pump of a tropical fruit syrup known as “mermaid syrup”.

Now, I know that drinking enough water is a rather boring human task, but do we actually need to add packets of flavouring – which arguably detracts from the levels of hydration we can actually reach – just to discipline ourselves to drink regular old water? And is it really still water, after all that?

Even if these flavoured powders don’t contain sugar, which some don’t, they’re not necessarily good for you either. Experts recommend dropping fresh fruit into your water instead, if your tap water needs a little sweetness to encourage you to drink more.

Plus, the language that is being used to advertise the powders – such as “skinny mixes” – is feeding into diet culture norms that are most certainly best left behind.

TikTokker @beccers_gordon refers to her own WaterTok recipes as “Water with a little bit of spice ✨”. 

Someone commented on one of her videos – which shows her “flavoured water” colouring her tongue, Slush Puppy style – “If water dyes your tongue a different colour it’s juice”.

Another commented: “If that’s water, my diet coke is water too”.

The crazy, but probably unsurprising, thing is that the more people are freaking out about how weird the WaterTok trend is, the more that fans are digging their heels in and insisting that these sugary, syrupy drinks in fact still count as water. 

Has the world gone mad? Probably.