For a while in the 2000s, drinking neon-colored sugar water was just about the most manly thing you could do, at least if the marketing for energy drinks was to be taken literally. These drinks came in flavors such as “Hardcore Apple” and, um, “Assault”; the art on their cans referenced venomous snakes, mythical beasts, the military. The companies that made them tended to forgo traditional advertising in favor of sponsoring athletes famous for getting punched or jumping off things. Their slogans made promises invoking conquest and might: A can of this stuff would give you wings, fuel your fire, unleash the beast.
Recently, though, a new kind of energy drink has emerged. Or rather, the same drinks have emerged in a new package. The active ingredients tend to be pretty much the same—taurine, guarana, and, most saliently, caffeine—but the marketing is gentler, the flavors are fruitier, and the cans are cuter. Beverage companies seem to have realized something that—not to brag—I have understood since I was about 15: There is nothing inherently male, or masculine, about being tired.
As of this year, energy drinks are a roughly $80 billion business. Relatively speaking, however, the category is quite young, about 200 years younger than soda. In the 1980s, an Austrian businessman fell in love with Krating Daeng, a bottled drink adored in Thailand for helping workers stay alert. He partnered with that company’s founder, added carbonation (to appeal to international consumers), and rebranded it with an English name. Thus Red Bull was born, and an entirely new class of beverage was introduced to the world.
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These beverages were different from soda, which was already an impossibly crowded market, and they needed to set themselves apart. So Red Bull—along with, most notably, Monster and Rockstar, which arrived in the early 2000s—worked to appeal to a demographic that was supposedly ripe for the taking: adolescent and early-20s men. They did this by positioning themselves as fuel for masculinity’s great pursuits—playing video games, doing sports, getting drunk. In essence, they laundered the feminine connotations of sweetness and fizz into something a real man would drink. Much like many of the people consuming them, these drinks seemed to revel in being a little disgusting: They tasted vaguely of poison and looked like nuclear waste. They dared you to find a problem with this.
Then, as that demographic grew up, energy drinks became a tool of efficiency. Starting sometime in the 2010s, it was really not all that uncommon to see a guy in khakis drinking NOS, which is named after a method that street racers use to make their cars go faster. The energy that had previously been acquired and expended while playing Grand Theft Auto was now being used to format a spreadsheet. Life comes at you fast.
In the past decade and a half, as energy drinks started to go more mainstream, advances in flavor science and packaging technology enabled companies to more easily produce a wider variety of drinks—which a novelty-obsessed consumer base happily guzzled down. At the same time, soda popularity flatlined and wellness culture ascended. These conditions created the perfect environment for energy drinks’ second explosion, when Celsius came along and transformed them from party fuel and productivity juice into something just as improbable: liquid fitness.
Celsius’s formula was sugar-free, and its flavors were much less abstract—fruits and herbs, ingredients you could feel good about if you squinted. Its slogan—”Live Fit”—spoke not to conquering one’s external enemies but achieving domination over one’s physical form. Its cans were slim and neutral, almost elegant, and they promised to boost metabolism and burn body fat. (They also noted, in much smaller print, that the drink is unlikely to lead to weight loss on its own.) From 2020 to 2023, Celsius sales increased tenfold. It now makes up more than 20 percent of the energy-drink market, for which it has also created new customers. People who would never be caught dead swilling neon fizz from a camouflage can were suddenly consuming a drink that was materially the same, but was being sold by exploiting a different set of unattainable aspirations, using a different vocabulary.
Last year alone, convenience-store sales of energy drinks increased by 10 percent. This new interest is largely being driven by female-coded drinks such as Alani Nu, which was created by a fitness influencer and is promoted by Brittany Mahomes and Paris Hilton. (Last year, Celsius bought Alani Nu for $1.8 billion; that same quarter, Celsius’s revenue increased 84 percent.) Bloom, a different brand founded by different fitness influencers, sold $1.3 million worth of drinks in a single week after introducing its own lilac-canned, “metabolism boosting” energy drinks in 2024. This week, the caffeine-free energy-drink company Update announced that it would be “relaunching” itself with a new partner, Kim Kardashian, already an avid fan of the brand.
And sometime this spring, Monster is set to launch FLRT, an energy drink marketed so squarely at women that it feels a little humiliating. The drink claims to support skin and hair health in addition to doing the normal energy-drink stuff (providing energy); its website showcases gals in going-out tops and vows that “energy should be as vibrant, fearless, and fun as those who drink it.” It comes in flavors that could just as easily be nail-polish shades: “Berry Tempting,” “Guava Lava,” “Sunset Squeeze.” In case the target audience wasn’t obvious enough, the logo is a hand-drawn daisy.
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Just over a decade ago, when energy drinks’ first, male-focused wave was cresting, researchers from the University of Akron, in Ohio, embarked on a small study to try to understand what all this energy—and all this advertising—was doing to the people drinking it. They asked their subjects whether they agreed with a series of statements, including “I think a young man should try to be physically tough, even if he’s not,” and “If I consume energy drinks, I will be more willing to take risks.” They also asked them about their sleep habits and overall health. They found that men who were more invested in masculine ideals—especially young white men—were markedly more likely to drink energy drinks, and also that the ones who drank more energy drinks tended to have worse sleep.
The study, which was published in the journal Health Psychology, was groundbreaking in that it showed that men, too, were being hurt by rigid physical standards, gendered stereotypes, the way ubiquitous advertising turns ideals into expectations. Functionally, energy drinks and their marketing had done to men what so many other products had done to women: manufactured inadequacy, and then sold something that they claimed would fix it. Now women have energy drinks too. Great.
