Starbucks Brought Back the Unicorn Frappuccino, And It Sent Me into a Nostalgia-Maxxing Spiral

For those who remember, it was the original color-change drink, back when we all used copious amounts of food coloring, blue spirulina and edible glitter to turn just about every meal into something unicorn, mermaid or Roy G. Biv-inspired. (Does anyone else remember not being able to look away from all those videos of people tearing apart rainbow grilled cheeses?!) The more I sipped the Unicorn Frappuccino, the more I started to wonder: What sparked its return, and why am I more interested in it now than I was the first time around?

The first, most obvious answer is money. With drive-thru coffee chains on the rise (see: Dutch Bros, Scooter's Coffee and 7 Brew, to name a few), Starbucks has spent the summer adding newer, bolder—and ever more vibrant—drinks to its menu to draw people in. The chain's also invested heavily in renovating stores to reclaim its place as the ultimate third space for people to hang out in. Those efforts seem to be paying off, as same-store sales have climbed 7.9 percent this quarter.

But it also marks a larger trend: Millennials' and older generations' nostalgia for a simpler, pre-AI era—and Gen Z and Gen Alpha's yearning for a time they've never experienced. The term for the latter is known as anemoia, coined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows creator John Koenig. You can see it in the resurgence of landlines via the popularity of Tin Can, people dressing as Lizzie McGuire at Hilary Duff concerts and the buzz surrounding the return of MySpace.

This desire dovetails with the calls to "Jackmaxx," or live a slowed-down pace of life a la Jack Johnson, when we were still online, sure, but not chronically so. The funny thing is, we were chronically online then too. It's just that back then, these were tools for connection. Now, we get everything from recipes to dating advice from Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. We consume content more than we create it, reducing our actual comments on social media from thoughtful additions to one- to two-word prompts like "OOTD" or "cellulite scrub" so a bot can DM us links to buy the things we see in Reels.

Picking up a landline, using a camera with film that needs to be developed, sitting at Starbucks and sipping a Unicorn Frappuccino—they're driven by nostalgia, but I'd also argue they're bids for connection. Indulging invites stories from people who experienced them the first time around; it helps you relate. And in a time when it's hard to know what's real on the internet, that feels real. And refreshing. Even if it arrives in the form of a not-seen-in-nature pink-and-blue drink.