P Diddy and Mark Wahlberg's Lazy Attempt to Redefine Water

Mark Wahlberg and P Diddy hanging out, believing their own hype. via Youtube.

As someone who constantly ends up accidentally hungover through no fault of my own, I was immediately drawn to Puff Daddy and Mark Wahlberg’s strange announcement that they had joined forces to relaunch "Aqua Hydrate"—potentially the laziest named beverage in all of human history.  While the water has been available prior to the boys co-acquiring the brand, it’s clear both Diddy and Wahlberg have their sights on the little-tapped male hangover market.  Puffy has already in not so many words claimed it’s a cure, while Wahlberg has made the much-less boastful claim that he simply drank it while on the set of The Fighter.  This marks the first time two rappers (using the term loosely with Wahlberg) have entered the performance water business since 50 Cent gracefully hung up his Vitamin Water crown sometime in the last decade.  It also marks the first time the term ‘performance water’ has been used in an article on this site*.

When faced with a hangover one basically has two non-alcoholic cold beverage options:  Gatorade or the aforementioned Vitamin Water.  People from Montreal will claim that I’ve forgotten about Powerade, but I’m just going to continue on without addressing that.  Gatorade, created in 1965 at the University Of Florida to aide their Florida Gators (hence ‘Gator-ade’), was long the proven champion.  It had a vague but not overpowering sports theme that made you feel like when you got out of bed, realized you were out of Advil, put shorts on, walked to the corner store, realized you forgot your wallet, walked back home, walked back to the corner store, threw up in an alley and managed to remember your keys you were an athletic dynamo worthy of a chemical looking blue drink that sometimes gets poured on football coaches heads.  However, in the last few years Vitamin Water has taken a big chunk out of Gatorade’s business, quietly marketing to the hungover person who is deluded into thinking they’re intelligent, as opposed to the hungover person who is deluded into thinking they’re athletic.  One can only assume that the one-two punch of Vitamin Water being purchased by Coca Cola for 4.2 billion dollars and the fact that they have maintained success despite directly violating FDA regulations using vaguely healthy terms like ‘defense’ and ‘endurance’ sent Diddy scrambling to his Walhberg batphone to start scheming.  I started scheming by buying a bottle of AquaHydrate, putting it in my fridge and proceeded to get very, very drunk.

AOL.com is loving the crew.

The reason these two titans of industry are so pumped about the water is the brand’s claim of being ‘supercharged alkaline water enhanced with electrolytes’, which basically means that they can take purified water from whichever source they want, run it through a three step process and sell it for whatever the free market dictates.  They’re stingy with details on their website of where their water comes from (My money is on ‘the tap’) and some of the specifics of what’s even in it.  They even claim to have a mineral licensed exclusively to them for use in their water, which sounds so dystopian on paper it almost depresses me.

The first thing you notice about AquaHydrate is the striking similarities between the newly branded AquaHydrate bottles and the current branding of the shockingly closely named AquaFresh toothpaste.  Now obviously I’m not accusing any foul play, but really and truly the only difference between these containers is size and one word.  As for the million dollar question on everyone’s mind:  Does it cure a hangover?  It’s fucking water.  It cures you from your immediately desire to drink something cold, but ultimately you’re still a pile of garbage and it takes the same recovery time and misery period.  Even Puff and Mark can’t save you from the inevitable.

*Ed Note: Not verified

Follow Adam on Twitter: @adamjacksonreal

More on hangover culture:

Halloween: The Morning After

Sidemouth: Screw You, Brunch