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The best thing to happen to water since rain.”

This line is written in big, bold letters on a poster plastered across the London Underground wall. Even without any context, I find it vaguely irritating. There’s just something so… smug about it. The advert, I can only assume, is pushing yet another player in the ever-growing hydration market. The past few years have seen the quotidian act of drinking water given a trendy glow-up, complete with expensive accessories and sold under the guise of being a “lifestyle” choice rather than a base-level requirement for sustaining human life.

The Stanley cup has long been the big dog in this arena after going viral on social media for surviving a car fire in 2023. These oversized receptacles cost top dollar and have become stock-in-trade for the modern wellness influencer – a status symbol that shows you don’t just get your two litres of H2O a day, you look impossibly chic while doing it.

I initially imagine that Air Up, the brand being plugged while I patiently await the next Northern Line service, is merely the next in a long line of Stanley pretenders. Not so, as it turns out, when a promotional email (the first of many) coincidentally hits my inbox a few days later. Air Up has, in fact, taken things a step further, pioneering the next hydration innovation that no one asked for: aroma-flavoured water.

If you haven’t already come across this brave new world of liquid enhancement – described by the brand as “the world’s first refillable Scentaste™ drinking system” – allow me to explain. The Airup concept works thus: there’s nothing in the water itself, but the specially designed bottle comes with scented pods designed to trick your brain into thinking that what you’re drinking is flavoured, through a process called retronasal olfaction. This ensures the water remains “zero calories!”, a fact that is joyfully proclaimed by much of the marketing material that I’m now being bombarded with on a regular basis.

The idea was first successfully marketed towards children – or rather, their parents – as a way of getting kids to drink more water instead of sugary beverages. More recently, the company has set its sights on a whole new demographic: Gen Z. Hence a noticeable shift in tone and language, with talk of “wellness upgrades” and transforming “hydration into a sensory habit that fits seamlessly into daily routines”.

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It also explains the slew of new ads with nauseating catchphrases (“Plain water’s shaking in its little boots”, to name just one), and the flavour pack expansions aimed squarely at young adults, such as the Wellness Variety Pack (Cucumber Mint, Citrus Rosemary, Apple Ginger) and the Mocktails Variety Pack (Virgin Mojito, Virgin Colada, Virgin Strawberry Daiquiri – a clever rebrand of mint, coconut/pineapple and strawberry if ever there was one).

Look, I’ve no wish to hate on people simply trying to up their water intake as a healthy and achievable 2026 goal. And not everyone likes or can even abide the taste of plain water – as Claudia Winkleman famously attested to on the Off Menu podcast with Ed Gamble and James Acaster (uttering the iconic line: “I don’t like or believe in water”). Why then does this new development bother me so much?

Firstly, there’s the cost. Air Up could well be the natural heir to the Stanley Cup’s throne based on price tag alone: the bottle itself costs from £29.99 (for a plastic 600ml bottle) to 54.99 (for 850ml in steel), while the scent pods cost £6.99 per pack of three. Each pod last for up to five litres of water, which means that if you were to drink the recommended two litres per day, one flavour pack would last for just over one week. In a cost-of-living crisis, spending around £340 a year on pimping up tap water feels like the last thing anyone needs to be budgeting for.

The whole thing has more than a whiff of Emperor’s New Clothes about it. Want to make water slightly less boring without the calories? Throw in a fruit or herbal teabag, or you can literally add some fruit or herbs into it, the way they do at fancy spas: orange, lemon or lime slices; mint leaves; hell, you can toss in some strawberries if you want to create your very own “Virgin Strawberry Daiquiri”. It’ll be a darn sight cheaper than shelling out for scented pods.

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And, at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old woman before her time, what’s wrong with a glass of Robinsons? Yes, squash might not be as sexy or trendy as whatever the latest bit of futuristic olfactory tech is, but it packs a bigger flavour punch and only has 3-5 calories per glass if you opt for a sugar-free variant. Price-wise, one 1.75 litre bottle of double-strength Robinsons makes 17.5 litres of squash; at a cost of £3.75, that’s 21p a litre, less than half the price of Air Up’s 46p.

But probably the thing I find most galling is that it’s all part of a distressing wider trend, one in which the most unexotic and ubiquitous of human experiences is being systematically repackaged and “upsold” to us at every turn. Air Up sells itself with the tagline “the easiest way to drink water” – but surely the easiest way to drink water is simply to turn on a tap and hold a glass underneath it, rather than invest in a “hydration system” that requires a monthly subscription.

So I’m going to say it. The emperor is naked – and no one really needs scent-flavoured water to spice up their life.