With her white go-go boots and thick lashes, the Green M&M was the Marilyn Monroe of the confectionery world. Everyone adored her – girls, gays and gamers alike. Green appeared in adverts crawling on her hands and knees at the beach like a 2000s Jennifer Lopez video. She was always engaged in flirtatious lesbian banter with the other female M&M, the coquettish Brown, or putting a piece of chocolate into her mouth before making a joke about premature ejaculation. When the feminist academic Camille Paglia once wrote that “the great sex symbols of Hollywood were manufactured beings, engineered by trial and error, with the mass audience as their ultimate judge and jury”. I like to think she was talking about the Green M&M.
Not so any more.
In a move that is sure to genuinely rattle Fox News hosts like a box of Tic Tacs, Mars Wrigley announced on Thursday that the M&M squad will be undergoing a “progressive” makeover. Green will now wear trainers in order to “reflect confidence and empowerment as a strong female” who is “known for much more than her boots”. Brown’s heels will also be lowered to a more professional height. Red, the cocksure alpha of the group, has learned to treat his co-chocolates with kindness, while anxious Orange will be “embracing his true self” (ie, tying his shoelaces, presumably because he’s afraid of falling down).
Mars has also confirmed that M&Ms will be “moving away from only one body size” and stripped of their prefixes to highlight “their personalities rather than their gender”.
The decision was obviously reported as paying “woke” service to Gen Z, but anyone who has spent more than two minutes on TikTok will know that Gen Z’s primary interests consist of asking celebrities to spit on them and making jokes with at least five layers of ironic detachment. On the M&MS website, each candy now has a short interview to reveal more of their personality. Green, for example, announces that her best quality is now “being a hypewoman” while Blue quotes a Beyoncé song from eight years ago. This is what you get when a bunch of executives – who haven’t had much to do for the last two years because the office has been shut – get together and try to “disrupt” their industry by pandering to a demographic they haven’t interacted with for 20 years.
Brands think they can appeal to Gen Z by making a slightly more diverse cast of anthropomorphic characters aimed at selling you chocolate-branded boxer shorts, but anxious teens aren’t looking for a role model in an anxiety-ridden orange M&M. They’re looking to escape brands as much as possible by foraging and cosplaying as anime maids on TikTok. If Mars really wanted to appeal to Gen Z, they should have given each M&M a bisexual girlfriend and £40,000 in student debt.