The Atlantic: How Pink Salt Took Over Millennial Kitchens

Although pink Himalayan salt is perfectly functional for its intended culinary purpose—making food salty—it’s never before been particularly prized or venerated for its quality. That makes its meteoric rise from food-world also-ran to modern lifestyle totem all the more unlikely. For it to happen, a lot of seemingly separate dynamics in food, media, and health had to collide. [...]

That memorable look gives the product an advantage that would otherwise be difficult for marketers to assign to something as mundane as salt: a distinctive brand. “I mean, it’s really pretty, right?” says Megan O’Keefe, the business manager of SaltWorks, America’s largest salt importer. “The pink color and the natural look make seeing a grinder filled with it impactful, and that’s attractive to consumers.” [...]

The salt’s color is certainly key to its success as an Instagram icon of aesthetically pleasing home cookery; there are more than 70,000 images under the #pinksalt hashtag. But it also works on another, less obvious level. According to Mark Bitterman, the author of several books on fine salts, Himalayan pink’s aesthetic difference allows consumers to read other differences into it. “We’ve been told we’re not supposed to eat salt, but we need to, and we’re biologically compelled to, and flavor doesn’t work without it,” he says. “So we had to find some way to understand this tension between the existential terror of eating it and the physiological reality of needing it. What we did was we said, ‘Uh, natural salt, pink salt, whatever—that’s safe.’” [...]

And it’s not just food. People love the salt so much that it’s begun showing up in beauty products and decor, such as bath scrubs and salt lamps. Hillary Dixler Canavan, the restaurant editor of the food-culture website Eater, sees that as part of a larger attitude in wellness. “Gwyneth Paltrow once dipped a french fry in Goop face cream and ate it to show how organic it is,” she says. “There is this idea that your beauty supply should be food, and your food should be beauty, as a signifier that you really value natural and organic ideals.”

read the article