- Coppery Apple
I first met Trident Layers, handsome-as-anything little striped slices of gum in the style of the KFC Double Down after a free sample pack floated onto the kitchen counter for the pink variety. Hello, boys. This review is for the green variety.
Circulating free samples of luxury products is a virtue I champion in any company, and I'll tell you what: it works. Slouching home from work last week I buckled into a Hasty Market and instead of a can of Fresca, which I had my mind set on, I was pulled over to the gum rack by a silent snake charmer's call. Layers was my new voodoo master.
If I hadn't tasted the freebies, I never would have elected this arbitrarily. It's spendy stuff, over $2.00 for a package. The jacket itself is a smart little work of design. It opens like a book, elegant-cigarette-case-style like you've seen over the past year in gum trends, and the fat, silver papered pieces are fixed in place on their little shelf with a dot of some silicone adhesive. They don't lean into one another like exhausted sheep, and it's true, I found myself respecting them a little more as individual things with dignity every time I flipped open the booklet and found them all gleaming and upright. The embossed green-on-green lettering is glossy and appealed to me as fresh the way a newly mown lawn does. A lawn I did not even have to mow.
The first chew opened with a soft, though still aldente consistency, and a brightly tart apple full-mouth flavour. Very nice, I thought. The pineapple note is a little tricky to pick up, but I think it is present in the slightly metallic minty offset, and I can only assume it is represented visually in the darker green "meat" of the gumwich, according to the real-fruit analogy visual on the package. I couldn't dectect any syprupy pineapple accords on their own. I feel like those are best found in wine gums, and there is no wine gum in this chew.
It is the business of gum primarily to freshen the mouth, and we associate a fresh mouth with a cool mentholated sensation. For anyone though who has had a swig of juice just after brushing their teeth and wondered, mid-gag, why the vomit-taste in their mouth had flooded front to back rather than the tradition back to front route, the toe-curling sensation of acid with mint can make you feel like you've lost at life a bit.
If it were 1997 or before, I would have spit the little blob across the basement at this point and gone upstairs for a grilled cheese, 10 oreos and a half a 2 litre bottle of Sprite, chugged vertically to clear my unsophisticated, chub-padded palate, then watched some back-to-back episodes of Little House on the Prairie to induce a crying jag to cleanse the experience entirely. A few more chews in, I am happy to report that the flavour combination in Green Apple, Golden Pineapple is more closely aligned to the lime with spearmint of a julep than with Crest and Minute Maid. More fusion than clash. The diffuse aroma from the mouth is good, good enough that you may be asked within a fair 10 minutes of application what it is you have in your mouth, and perhaps passively encouraged to please share.
My only complaint with Trident Layers' Green Apple, Golden Pineapple is their swish-print subtitular claim "With *Real* Fruit Flavour". That's nice, and in terms of the visuals of the package, the well-kerned brush-stroke typeface makes it look like your rosewood cane-gripping mentor has just whispered a nugget of valuable life wisdom to you with a wink, that you'll repeat to your own proteges in your own golden years as you battle an earnest throat-lump. With real fruit flavour, little one.
Seriously? Kill me. Who goes to gum for real fruit? One of the great genius compositions in flavour, Coca Cola, is a sublime work of beauty and imagination. It replicates nothing in nature, and still it is, ahh, so choice. It is the careful crafting a human idea, a dream made real, and that is why I will love it till the day I die. I would be so impressed if Trident would just let Layers be what it is: interesting, brightly tasty, and very fake, without the stamp of structured authenticity to lure salivating chewers to its soft, and carefully manufactured, bosom. Hello boys, indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment