It’s big. It’s heavy. And it’s made with at least a little bit of lead.
The Stanley Cup has been all over the news lately, with its most recent starring role on Saturday Night Live. In the sketch, cast members Heidi Gardner and Chloe Fineman, alongside host Dakota Johnson, took aim at the season’s hottest way to hydrate.
“Hey, mama, are you like us, a pretty lady who drives a big car?” Fineman’s character asks, before she and her friends rattle off the attributes of Stanley stans, like being between the ages of 12 and 70, going to Target daily, and being physically or spiritually blonde. “Now, we’re all about them big dumb cups.”
The cup is indeed large. The 40-ounce Quencher clocks in at 1.4 pounds, or the size of a tiny dumbbell. As Johnson points out in the sketch, it has enough capacity to hold nearly an entire bottle of wine (“Get in there, Josh!”).
But is it a good cup?
If we were to judge by SNL’s assessment alone, the clear answer would be no. As Gardner flipped her periwinkle Quencher upside down, liquid trickled out the top like a watering can. You could almost call the sketch a form of design criticism.
And SNL isn’t the only one throwing daggers at the brand. Last week, TikTokers started posting about their Quenchers testing positive for high levels of lead. The cup’s manufacturer, Pacific Market International, said in a statement that while lead is used as part of the Stanley cup’s vacuum insulation, it’s covered by a stainless steel layer that makes it inaccessible to consumers. In other words, your Quencher is probably not going to give you lead poisoning.
“Rest assured that no lead is present on the surface of any Stanley product that comes into contact with the consumer nor the contents of the product,” a spokesperson said in a statement to CNN. As far as the leaking goes, influencers online suggest using stoppers as a fix.
The water bottle business is wildly competitive, and as the SNL sketch shows, Stanley’s appeal goes far beyond its design qualities. The cup has become a cultural signifier—for better or for worse—but will it be able to withstand the inevitable backlash?
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