I’ll have a mocha soy latte — with extra glitter, please

Perhaps you see coffee as equal parts art project and beverage. Like oil paint or gouache, it’s a medium for making pictures of grumpy cat and Minions. Or if you fancy yourself more of an Impres-

sionist, perhaps your beverage is designed to capture the soft-focus pastel magic of a unicorn. Or if you’re an abstract artist, maybe a green, vaguely tree-sh apedpileof whipped cream passes for a Christmas tree.

But now latte artists have a new material to work with: Edible glitter is popping up in coffee cups around the globe. The sparkly stuff adds pixie dust to an otherwise ordinary froth of steamed milk, and with a little food coloring, it can make a drink look like a shimmering jewel.

That’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. For the many people who hate glitter, this is just another way of ruining coffee, a perfectly respectable drink without need for embellishment. “If you get it on you, be prepared to have it on you forever,” the comedian Demetri Mar

tin once quipped about the substance. “Glitter is the her- pes of craft supplies.” It joins our long list of foods that exist mainly for their Instagram mability. (See also: sushi doughnuts, cloud eggs, cheese tea, blue wine, charcoal pizza. I could keep going.)

The trend has been cred- ited to the Mumbai coffee shop Coffee by Di Bella, which began serving its “diamond” and “gold” varieties of the drink to customers this fall. For obvious reasons, it’s been

popular on Instagram, so it skipped o ver to the United Kingdom, where cafes in London and Scotland are now offering the drink. The European coffee chain Costa has

sold “sparkle coffee” as a spe- cial promotion. And now, glitter is gaining ground in the United States and Mexico, where a number of inde- pendent coffee shops have begun to offer it as an addon. One of them is Crema Coffee and More, a pop-up coffee shop in Pinellas Park, Florida, owned by April Hall. She got the idea from look- ing at the elaborate work of cake decorators, and applied those principles to coffee.

“I thought, this could be glamorous just lik eo ur cakes are,” said Hall. “We need to start making our coffee kind of like our cupcakes.”

Hall sprinkles a tiny pinch of food-grade edible glitter - “You don’t have to use a lot to make a big impact” - which floats atop the coffee’s froth. A 16-ounce latte is $4.95.

At Cafe Antigua, an Oklahoma City coffee shop owned by her parents, Ana Sofia Valdez says she was inspired by Starbucks’s Unicorn Frappuccino. Many of her glitter lattes come in the trendiest color of 2017 - millennial pink. “Now we offer glitter in any of our drinks,” for an upcharge of 25 cents, said Valdez. Other versions of the drink have

p oppedupi nB ellevue, Washington; Kingston, New York; Sarasota, Florida; Santa Ana, California., and even Tijuana, Mexico.

If any enterprising coffee shopsgetanid eatotrythe glitter latte, know this: There is a difference between “edible” and “non-toxic” glitter. The former is made of “starchbased food products” and can be digested, and the latter is made of plastic and is not meant to be consumed. It won’t necessarily hurt you in a small dose, though: As a maker of glitter pills has found, it will, um, pass right through you. It’s not the only joke about glitter and bodily functions.

Anyway, buy your glitter from the baking section of a store, not the arts-andcrafts aisle, or else you’ll end up like one contestant on a charity edition of “The Great British Bake-Off” in 2012. Actress Sarah Hadland’s use of potentially nonedible glitter “prompted so much panic among viewers that ‘edible glitter’ has now been registered as one of the top ten food concerns in Britain by the Food Standards Agency,” according to the Daily Mail. Or, really, don’t buy the plastic kind at all, because some scientists have called for a total ban on the material, which affects ocean ecosystems. (For what it’s worth, Slate says there wouldn’t be much of an impact.)