This company wants to cure your hangover through Instagram
It’s the unofficial start of summer and the warm months ahead will likely coincide with a bit of overindulging. Whether it’s too much beer or too much barbeque, summer nights often lead to painful mornings – enter Dirty Lemon. The company wants to use another Beyoncé-approved seasonal staple to help you detox: lemonade. Dirty Lemon infuses its product with charcoal, ginger and dandelion root in an effort to absorb toxins and aid digestion.
Charcoal is typically used in a hospital setting to treat overdoses or poisonings but has become trendy as an at-home cleansing ingredient. While the ingredient is safe when administered by a medical official, it can be problematic when used at home because it binds to medications and nutritional supplements and renders them ineffective.
“Charcoal works with whatever is in your stomach at the time that you drink it,” says Zak Normandin, CEO and co-founder of Dirty Lemon. “So if you’ve had alcohol, pizza or a heavy meal, and there are ingredients you don’t want to be absorbed into your system, the charcoal is going to absorb them.”
Normandin wants to market Dirty Lemon as the anti-cleanse—it’s not about fasting, he says; it’s about having it all. “Millennials want to go out at night and but also exercise during the day.”
Instead of entering the grocery space, Dirty Lemon is available via text message and Instagram. To order, you enter your credit card information once and then just comment on one of their public photos or text a number they provide. Dirty Lemon provides numbers for those in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the UK.
The lemonade doesn’t come cheap—at $65 for a six-pack, it’s being marketed as a luxury product. But Normandin is banking that millennials with cash to spare will drink it up.