At this point, most agree that instantly uploading pictures of the beautiful food you’re about to eat that none of the rest of us will ever have is just obnoxious. In fact, the Canadian Obesity Network a few years ago even linked that practice to an unhealthy fixation on food, as these posters seemed more focused on their meal than the (hopefully) loved ones they were about to share it with. We wonder what those same experts would say about the latest trend for the caffeine/Instagram-obsessed: the selfieccino.
The overhead cappuccino shot is already the most obligatory and twee of the social media food posts, and coffee shops are actually being designed to be more Instagrammable. So to add printable foam of your face on the most narcisstic of hot beverages is a bit insufferably meta. Hello magazine reports that the Tea Terrace cafe on the top floor of London’s House Of Fraser department store has a special printer that allows imprints of photos in cappuccino foam. Customers send a photo to the barista, who then prints out the image in foam using a fine art printer. Many people are going with the tried-and-true selfie, hence the name. But the machine can also upload pictures of a beloved pet, for example, which you may enjoy looking at right before you drink its foamy head off. The visual drink costs £5.75, or about $8. Tea Terrace owner Ehab Salem Shouly explains to Hello: “Due to social media the dining experience has completely changed. It’s not enough to just deliver great food and service anymore, it’s got to be Instagram worthy.”
While the Tea Terrace is enjoying a bit of popularity right now thanks to these popular yet fleeting works of art, a little internet sleuthing shows that they are not the first. Selfie Coffee in Singapore was already pushing image-based drinks, even printing the photos out in color on a layer of sweet whipped cream, making destroying the image in a “satisfying swirl” the fun part, we guess. They claim to be using a “secret printing device,” but that’s what YouTube is for.
Still, it’s hard to imagine any coffee drink that’s worth eight whole dollars, no matter how many new followers you might get.