I Will Never Be Rich Enough to Own a Fridge With 15 Different Kinds of Ice

Ice: It’s one of the world’s simplest concepts. Water gets cold enough to form a solid that can then also make other things cold. Cool! Over 4 billion years of Earth, ice has remained ice—the cube size has varied, the retrieval has grown more convenient and the storage perfected. Things got a little weird when Robert Matthew Van Winkle added the flavor “vanilla” before it and rapped in 1990 that “ice is back with my brand new invention,” but even then, ice stayed the same: blocks of frozen, refreshing water molecules. Until now.

In a tale as old as time, suburban women on TikTok have taken something that needed no improvement and asked, “How can I waste money on this?” For weeks, I have been immersed, entranced, horrified, humbled, and delighted by TikTok’s ice drawer community, and what I’ve learned is: Plain ice is for peasants. Cranberry rose ice with red prism powder is for those in a tax bracket that I can’t even think about.

But that’s not the only royal ice stocking these capitalist queens’ fridges: There are ice rods specifically for water bottles, bulldog-shaped iced specifically for hard liquor, and lemon and lime-infused spheroids for your “bedside carafe”—because when you’re rich, you have a bedside carafe for your water and not three half-empty glasses and an empty Poland Springs bottle under your bed.

It’s hard to pinpoint when this began, or if it’s been happening for centuries and TikTok has just revealed it to us bottom feeders. All I can say is that I was first introduced to this world in late September when TikToker Kami LaRae—a mom with nearly 1 million followers who posts restock and organizational toks—uploaded what seems to be the platform’s first-ever “ice drawer restock.” This restock included 15 kinds of ice, and ever since, her ice content has gotten fancier and more frequent.

Now, dozens of similar cleaning/organizing/food-in-lavish-container accounts have followed suit. There are spheres, pebbles, hexagons, pumpkins, pineapples, cucumber-and-mint-infused cubes, strawberry lemonade butterflies, matcha-and-mocha coffee hearts. I’m not making any of this up. These women have ice drawers with anywhere from eight to 18 different varieties of shaped, flavored, and colored ice. What’s going to be next?! Gold-flecked toilet paper? Command strips embossed with motivational quotes? Holographic contact solution?!

This is no shade to LaRae. After all, these are the women who have beautified their laundry rooms and ASMR’d taking out the trash—who’ve stocked their pantries with labeled plastic food containers, because what our food already comes in simply is not aesthetically pleasing enough. And I appreciate them. It was only a matter of time before they looked at an ice bucket and said, “What the fuck is this poor-looking shit?” On the TikTok of yore, nothing said “you’re poor” like having your eggs still in their original carton Now, nothing says “you’re poor” like having an ice drawer—let alone a homely ice bin—filled with basic, clear ice.