The fruity martini’s colorful comeback

Forget performative males — let’s talk about performative drinking. If you’ve opened Instagram anytime in the past two years, you’ve probably noticed that the martini has taken over. And not only is the drink everywhere, it has gone technicolor.

What was once a drink associated with old-money restraint (and a hint of snobbery)  has become a rainbow of bright lychee, jewel-toned berries, neon passionfruit, and whatever shades of pink, orange, and green just scream to be taken a picture of.

Everywhere you look, there’s a fruity martini — the cocktail du jour that somehow feels retro, modern, ironic, sincere, and always photo-ready. One part 90s nostalgia, one part algorithmic aesthetics, one part cultural palate shift. The martini is having a renaissance, for sure. But the fruity martini? That’s a full-blown cultural moment.

The ‘90s are back with a vengeance. Low-rise jeans, frosty lip gloss, baguette bags, fur boots — the whole Y2K closet has been ripped open and dumped all over TikTok. Gen-Z has been single-handedly keeping the eBay reseller market alive. And now that drinks trends are starting to catch up to fashion, the Cosmo’s younger, more “phone-eats-first” cousins have followed.

Sabrina Carpenter, the 2025 Carrie Bradshaw of TikTok-era pop stardom, recently said that if she were a cocktail, she’d be a Pornstar Martini — the passionfruit-vanilla martini, typically served with a sidecar of prosecco. This might’ve just been a cheeky nod to Carpenter’s hyper-feminine, sexual and witty music style, but there is data backing up the Pornstar Martini’s rise. According to Yelp, searches for the Pornstar martini are up 47% and passionfruit martini is up 83%, compared to last year.

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It’s not quite Carrie’s iconic Cosmopolitan, but it fits. It’s fruitier, a little exotic, a little wilder. It reflects exactly where we are: a generation unafraid to play, nostalgic for an era we didn’t live through but desperately want to recreate.

And while some bartenders might argue that none of these drinks are actually martinis (and they’re not wrong), the truth is that fruity martinis sweeping back into mainstream drinking culture reveal the shifting priorities of modern drinkers: aesthetic appeal, algorithmic performance, nostalgia, and approachability.

The First Wave — and the revival

“The martini has gone through various phases over its long life,” veteran drinks journalist and cocktail expert Robert Simonson tells me. “There was a period in the 1990s and the early 2000s where anything you put in a martini glass was called a martini.”

This is the spiritual birthplace of the fruity martini — the era of the Appletini, Watermelon Martini, Chocolate Martini, basically any flavor or color you could imagine, bartenders were making a “martini” out of it.

“It was more about the concept of drinking a cocktail as opposed to adhering to some classical recipe of what a martini was,” Simonson says.

Purists were understandably horrified. “The purists, they get cranky about this, you know, and say that it’s supposed to be gin and vermouth and that’s all a martini should be.”

But it didn’t matter. Young people of that era wanted something youthful, colorful, sweet — something you’d want to hold on a dance floor under club lights.

“Young people back then, they didn’t want to drink like their parents. So if their parents were drinking a dry martini at home or at the club, they wanted to try something different. They wanted something more youthful,” Simonson says. “Most of these drinks were served in clubs and discotheques… they were brightly colored. If you’re at a discotheque, you don’t want a glass of brown liquor.”

The fruity martini wasn’t a mistake of the 90s. It was a feature.

Then came the mid-aughts cocktail renaissance — speakeasy revival, vest-wearing bartenders, the return of obscure bitters, the emergence of the cocktail-as-craft.

“In the mid-aughts the cocktail revival began,” Simonson explains, “and a lot of bartenders and bars and cocktail bars started bringing back classic cocktails, trying to make them accurately as they were made when they were invented in the pre-Prohibition days.”

Suddenly the Appletini was embarrassing. The Lychee Martini was gauche. The Chocolate Martini was a punchline whispered in dark bars lit by Edison bulbs. Bartenders reclaimed the martini, refused to make its sugary variants, and insisted on precision.

“They started making regular martinis and these new bars would refuse to make the fruity or sweet martinis… because they wanted to show Americans what cocktails were once and what they could be.”

But, like all things in cocktail culture, the pendulum swung back.

Fruity martini 2.0

“In the past few years, because the martini has become so popular with people of all ages,” Simonson says, “a lot of bartenders and bars felt compelled to yet again experiment… Ironically, this inevitably brought them back to the martinis of the 1990s.”

You could argue that the first viral example of this experimentation was the espresso martini, whose rise in popularity coincided with the expansion of the coffee liquor market. But bartenders didn’t stop there, they traded in those other fruity, sugary, fluorescent liqueurs for real ingredients.

“They knew how to make a martini that could taste like green apple but didn’t use some synthetic, chemical green apple pucker liqueur,” he says. “They would use real apple juice or clarified apple juice or they would use an eau de vie from Europe.”

Simonson said bars like Milady’s in New York have done a great job reintroducing their version of a craft Appletini made with fresh fruit and professional technique. Many lychee martinis are now made with real lychee — the nut, the syrup, clarified juice or even house-fermented fruit.

“We’re getting back to where we were [the ‘90s],” Simonson says, “but it’s not quite the bad old days because these are being made with quality ingredients… so they’re much closer to martinis than the cocktails of the ‘90s.”

This is Fruity Martini 2.0 — a renaissance built on nostalgia, but fortified with skill.

Simonson sees the resurgence as partly generational, partly emotional and partly aesthetic.

“When you got on the other side of COVID,” he says, “people stopped being so interested in the history behind the cocktail… They just wanted to have fun.”

And nothing says fun like a neon-pink drink that photographs beautifully.

“It’s the Cosmo effect,” he continues. “Anytime anyone sees a Cosmo, it’s so pretty, more people order Cosmos. People like eye-catching things. And also there’s social media… these drinks look very good on Instagram.”

In other words: the fruity martini is not just a drink — it’s an aesthetic object.

Bars know this. They must.

“Definitely it has affected the bar,” Simonson says. “If they want to stay in business, they have to design their cocktail list with a few eye-catching ones… There’s always a few on every list, you can always tell which cocktails were created for social media.”

We live in a time where dishes and drinks are engineered not simply to taste good, but to be photographed well — bright colors, dramatic garnishes, interesting silhouettes. It’s performative food, and the fruity martini sits right in the center.

Gen Z meets the martini

Of course, no conversation about fruity martinis is complete without addressing the generational elephant in the room: the idea that Gen-Z drinks less. You’ve probably seen the headlines — we’re sober-curious, we prefer THC-infused drinks, we’re health-conscious, we’re a “no/low alcohol” generation.

(As a Gen Z-er — please point me in the direction of all these sober twenty-somethings because I have yet to meet them.)

Still, the perception that younger Americans are stepping back from alcohol is everywhere and it influences the kinds of drinks that become popular. “The whole reason we have no ABV and low ABV cocktails is because of the younger generation,” Simonson says.

And fruity martinis fit perfectly into this cultural moment: drinks that feel like cocktails but don’t taste aggressively alcoholic. Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture writer, sees it the same way. “It’s something that gives you the feeling of a cocktail while being a little bit juicier,” she says. “It’s just about feeling.”

It’s the same logic behind the espresso martini: you can justify a three-cocktail lunch if you tell yourself you’re mostly drinking coffee or fruit, not the alcohol-mixed-with-alcohol feeling you get from a classic martini.

Are fruity martinis even martinis?

Kennedy admits she has to stop herself from being snobbish about the definition. She’s a martini drinker, but she recognizes that not everyone has the constitution for it.

“I just have to constantly remind myself to not be a snob about it,” she says. “Because everyone is using the word ‘martini’ to describe things that are basically like, I don’t know, tiki drinks.”

She’s right. A lychee martini isn’t a martini. A Pornstar isn’t a martini. Most fruity martinis are actually daiquiri variations in pointy glasses.

“It’s all about the glassware right?” Kennedy says. “It’s because they’re served in a pointy glass or a coupe that we’re calling them martinis.”

The name is branding. The glass is branding. These drinks function as martinis socially, even if they have nothing in common with gin and vermouth.

“Martinis are really strong. They’re very very boozy. They’re a drinkers drink,” says Kennedy, “So to bring fruity stuff [back], it’s also part of like, martinis came back, espresso martinis came back. There’s just this interest in reinvigorating people’s relationship to cocktails.”

For drinks writer Dave Infante, the return of sweet, photogenic drinks fits into a much older story about American drinking habits: we like sweet stuff. A lot.

In October, he wrote a piece for his newsletter “Fingers” all about what he calls the “infantilization” of the American drinker. His article more so explored products like cereal-flavored craft beers and dessert-inspired hard liquors, but he says the two concepts are related.

There is a connection between what he calls “off-premise stunt gimmicks” and the return of martini variations: sweeter flavors make people feel less like they’re drinking alcohol, even if it’s the same ABV as any other drink.

“I think the American palate for years leaned toward sweet… all the way back to Prohibition and its repeal,” he says. During that era, people were literally masking the taste of poor-quality alcohol with sugar. “It’s like freshmen in college cutting the cheapest vodka they can find with orange juice.”

This established a precedent in American drinking culture: sweetness is comforting, approachable, safer. Bitter, boozy drinks require conditioning.

“These cocktails can be situated on that spectrum,” Infante says. “It requires a fairly mature palate to enjoy a dry gin martini. That’s not to say that  many Americans don’t have mature palates, they certainly do. But what plays well here tends to be more fruity, more sweet, more straightforward.”

So, fruity martinis aren’t necessarily childish — they’re simply familiar. They align with long-standing American taste preferences, ones that are resurfacing in a moment of maximal nostalgia.

The (social) media machine behind the martini

If the 1990s brought fruity martinis into clubs, social media brought them to every bar in America — polished, staged and algorithmically optimized.

“Social media is the way cocktail bartenders especially think about building menus,” Infante says. Drinks must be delicious, yes. But they must also perform online. “There’s enormous pressure to develop drinks that are both good to drink but also play well on social media for promotional purposes.”

This isn’t just anecdotal. He hears it constantly in his reporting.

Bartenders now have to ask questions like: Will it photograph well? Does the garnish stand out on camera? Will the color pop in a TikTok pan shot? Can it go viral? Will people order it for the vibe rather than the flavor?

“That changes the R&D process,” he says. “Now there’s this added consideration of well, is it going to work for social and if not, is there really still a point to it.”

For many bars, the answer is no. If it won’t go viral, it won’t go on the menu.

Infante points out that this isn’t fully measurable — no one can directly link Instagram views to bar sales — but the cultural influence is undeniable. The espresso martini didn’t just come back; it became the summer soundtrack. The Negroni Sbagliato with Prosecco? That was practically a TikTok campaign.

Fruity martinis tap perfectly into this landscape: bright, recognizable, playful and ideal for filming.

That said, not everyone loves where this is going. Kennedy is blunt about her concerns.

“I do worry we’re in a moment where it’s just too performative for social media,” she says. “Nothing feels authentic about it.”

She sees bartenders less empowered to experiment or use technique and more focused on giving people what they expect to see online.

“It just started to be so much of the same everywhere,” she explains. “It’s a flattening.”

The fruity martini revival exists in this tension: bartenders want creative freedom, but the market wants reliable aesthetics.

She isn’t the only one who feels this shift. Many bartenders now learn only a bar’s house cocktails rather than classic techniques. The basics fall away. The aesthetic — the client-first approach — defines the drink more than the craft.

“We’ve lost the art of technique in most spaces,” Kennedy says. “Bartenders come in and they just learn what that bar does.” The result? “A very disappointing cycle of bad drinks.”

“They never went away”

Not everyone sees fruity martinis as a guilty pleasure.

Tiffanie Barrière, award-winning bartender and educator known as “The Drinking Coach,” says these drinks never disappeared — they were just out of the spotlight. “They never went away,” she says. “A martini glass that has color in it is just what you should see,” she says. To her, fruity martinis aren’t a dumbing-down of cocktail culture; they’re approachable, joyful, and visually irresistible. “We eat with our eyes,” Barrière notes. A brown drink on the rocks simply doesn’t hit the same in a culture built on shareability.

Social media criticism also doesn’t faze her. When someone photographs a drink she made, it’s pride, not pandering. “That’s my baby going across the bar on the tray. When someone takes a picture, it’s like a birth certificate,” she says.

Barrière also sees a generational shift: younger drinkers aren’t drinking less — they’re drinking differently. “This generation wants to taste something besides alcohol,” she says. Fruity martinis, she argues, represent the democratization of drinking: less gatekeeping, more flavor, more fun.

The trend isn’t superficial. It reflects a cultural convergence of nostalgia, social media and a palate increasingly oriented toward approachable, fruit-forward flavors. And in a post-COVID world, people aren’t looking to be quizzed on cocktail history; they want something light, bright, and uncomplicated. A fruity martini offers a liquid throwback, a little luxury, a signal of playfulness — and yes, a small Instagrammable escape.

Importantly, the revival isn’t regressive. Bartenders are elevating these drinks with high-quality ingredients, local fruits, and refined technique. Some orders may still be aesthetic-driven, and TikTok may flatten aspects of cocktail culture, but the fruity martini isn’t just back. It’s better. As palates evolve, its next chapter is just beginning.

 

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