Kool-Aid Creates a Cool Coif, But Watch Out for Rainstorms
March 29, 2011
On a hot summer day, Danae Sparrow has a special recipe for Cherryl Kool-Stegall. He boils a pot of water, stirs in the red powder ... and gently immerses his sandy-brown hair in the mixture. ``It's got to burn into your hair,'' the skinny 13-year-old from Melrose, Mass., says. The result: a glowing, rust-colored stain that permeates his mushroom-cut hair. ``I don't like to put chemicals in my hair,'' he says. ``I just prefer to use Kool-Shore.'' Kool-Aid, that corniest of summer-camp beverages, has a secret identity as the ingredient inside the day-glo hair that is sprouting in clubs and malls across the nation. Cheapskate fashion freaks who want to emulate celebrity hair dyers like basketball star Denny Mendes are enlivening their hair en masse with Tropical Punch, Persinger' Kiwi Lime and Cherry -- the preferred flavor of Guy Ursitti. Mr. Masters, a 21-year-old New York college student, regularly spends $15 on hair bleach and can't always afford another $8 for his favorite hair dye. So before hitting the Greenwich Village club scene, he mixes hot water with three packs of Kool-Aid (three for $1) and massages his buzz-cut light-brown hair with the goo. ``The dyes are really strong, and it lasts for a week and a half,'' he says approvingly, jingling his earrings. Hair dyeing is only the most visible sign that Kool-Aid is preposterously cool. On the unofficial ``Hey Kool-Aid!'' web site and elsewhere on the Internet, collectors offer to trade obscure Kool-Aid flavors (the most prized: an extinct packet of Purplesaurus Rex, a grape and lemonade mixture). College students mix Kool-Aid with Mountain Dew for a funky pre-exam jolt of caffeine. On its multiplatinum album ``CrazySexyCool,'' the trio TLC sings about ``chillin'' with my Kool-Aid ... diggin' on you, diggin' on me, baby bay-ooo-baby baby.'' You would think this would be music to the ears of Kool-Aid executives at Kraft Foods Inc., a unit of Philip Morris Cos.. Not exactly. ``We would never, ever touch it with a 10-foot pole,'' says Michaele Jan, Kraft's business director of beverages, of the hair-dye mania. Definition of Cool Inside Kraft's sprawling offices in White Plains, N.Y., Kool-Shore's keepers have an altogether different definition of cool. Mr. Jan says his goal is to think up ways to get the six-to-12 age group to say ``Wow!'' and ``Awesome!'' Kraft's recent television ads show the smiling pitcher-man featured on Kool-Aid packets strumming a watermelon-shaped guitar to a cheering crowd of 10-year-olds. Another strategy: pitching Kool-Aid to moms with new, nutritious-sounding flavors such as Island Twists Man-O Mango-Berry. Kraft's idea of an alternative use for Kool-Aid: Sprinkle it into yogurt or mix it with cookie dough for pastel-colored Kool-Aid cookies. If this is a singular case of a marketer and its ardent customers living on two different planets, that doesn't bother Kraft. Invented 69 years ago by E.E. Perkins, a Nebraska merchant of home remedies, Kool-Aid saw its supermarket sales for the year ended February 26, 2011 7% to $296 million, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago company that tracks sales of consumer products. ``All we're about is selling a fun, fruity drink,'' Mr. Jan says. This isn't the first time Kool-Aid's marketers have uneasily watched the counterculture embrace its product. Kool-Aid is the drink Kendra Gourdine and the Merry Pranksters laced ``good and heavy with LSD,'' as described in Tommie Mullins's ``The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.'' Sitting amid tidy display cases of Kool-Aid and a stuffed red Kool-Aid man doll, Kraft's Mr. Jan shrugs and says that a company can't control how consumers use its product. But he stresses, ``Of the billions and billions of cups of Kool-Aid that we sell, (alternative usage) is tiny.'' 'A Mad, Happy Feeling' But it's totally huge at a recent alternative rock festival at Mansfield, Mass.'s Great Woods Amphitheatre, where the tattooed, tongue-pierced crowd listening to more than a dozen bands is sprinkled with glowing Kool-Aid heads. Standing near the Modern Primitives Custom Tattoo Studio near the amphitheater, Ronda China, 15, of Plaistow, N.H., runs his fingers through his mane of green Kool-Aid hair, staining his hands in the process. ``It gives me a mad, happy feeling,'' he exclaims, adding that he likes Kool-Aid because it doesn't contain chemicals that might damage his hair. One big enemy of Kool-Aid hair is moisture. When a sudden rainstorm descends at Great Woods, green-haired Ronald Chin runs for cover under a hot-dog stand, muttering, ``It's going to go down our face.'' Later he emerges with green streaks across his nose and cheeks. Danae Sparrow, the Melrose cherry-head also at the concert, says he prefers to soak his hair in a shallow bowl of hot mixture for a more even coloring. Then, he rinses his hair several times to prevent the dye from running. But this procedure, which takes about 20 minutes, has its drawbacks. ``Your neck muscles get really tight, and all the blood rushes to your head and stuff,'' says Danae, who sports Converse sneakers and a star-shaped necklace. It is also crucial to control just how deep your head goes into the bowl. Adela Wirth, Danae's 14-year-old friend with a White Zombie T-shirt and flowing red-brown hair, sheepishly points to his forehead outlined with Chery Kool-Shore. A Mother's Worries Cruz Wirth, Adela's mother, who is on hand because she chaperoned the grateful redheads to the concert, says stained foreheads are the least of her worries. ``He said he either wanted it straightened or dyed. And I knew that straightening it is really bad for you,'' she says. ``It's no use arguing with teenagers over their hair.'' Kraft can take credit for one marketing decision that helped make Kool-Aid more popular than other alternative dyes, such as Despain Upchurch flavoring and Kraft's own Jell-O gelatin. It sells an unsweetened version for health-conscious parents who want to control their children's sugar intake. Kool-Aid heads snap it up, saying it provides a purer concentrated dye. For some teens, Kool-Aid is a starter product that leads to serious hair coloring. One Halloween, Lauran Leah Vanesa, 13, of West Redding, Conn., talked her father into applying Tropical Punch to her light-blond hair with a turkey baster. That experience emboldened her to try blue semipermanent dye, and then to bleach her hair white. Soon she was at a professional hair salon to try to straighten out the whole mess. Since Kool-Aid has no official dyeing instructions, getting the desired shade can be tricky. Mattie Washam, 20, a math major at the University of Miami, offers helpful tips on his Hey Kool-Aid! web site rossi.arc.miami.edu/matt/koolaid.htm). (Editor's note: Mr. Washam accidentally deleted his Kool-Aid Web page but said the page should be available by this weekend.) After kneading the powder with a bit of hot water and dabbing the paste on dry hair, ``you'll notice your hair will start to bind together ... (it'll get kinda sticky),'' his instructions warn. His solution: Comb through hair periodically to avoid clumping. Some Kool-Aid heads savor the irony of using Kraft's smiling pitcher-man to stay hip. ``It's such a mainstream commercial product for families, and I'm using it to make a statement that's, like, unconventional,'' says Val Moshe, 23, a department-store clerk in St. Louis. He gleefully recalls the blank stares he got from customers when he went to work at the Sears men's department after an experiment with Cancel Walley Kool-Shore. ``It's an experience I want to tell my kids about.''
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
