Celebrities: theyโ€™re just like us! They drink coffee, and sometimes they even get it themselves! As the News Editor for a coffee publication, I can attest that a lot of coffee โ€œnewsโ€ is basically just pics of celebs grabbing an iced coffee, trying not to be disturbed. Itโ€™s sad and voyeuristic and… oooo whoโ€™s that with Zac Efron?

Anywho, these coffee photo ops are more than just an invasion of privacy, theyโ€™re also a humanizing force for the Hollywood Elite. Because again, theyโ€™re just like us, they love coffee too! But as the Washington Post points out, this was not always the case. Back in the early era of Hollywood, coffee was a status symbol.

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In the days of Grace Kelly and Humphrey Bogart, coffee was used by stars to express โ€œEuropean sophistication.โ€ It was a way of appearing worldly and travelled. โ€œOh you havenโ€™t spent four hours at a cafe in Paris? You simply must.โ€ The article imports vintage photos from Steven Reaโ€™s Hollywood Cafe: Coffee With the Stars to draw physical comparisons between American stars and their European counterparts:

Photos of [American actress Lauren] Bacall drinking coffee with a cigarette between her fingers mirror similar ones of French actress Jeanne Moreau or Italian actress Sophia Loren.

But today, coffee is no longer a symbol of the Elite, but a way for the Elite to prove their Everyman status. University of Kentucky associate professor of anthropology Sarah Lyon tells WaPo that with the rise of Starbucks and second-wave coffee in the 90s, coffee became much more commonplace, a โ€œmiddle-class luxury.โ€ Coffee is no longer seen as a status symbol but as a humanizing factor, especially when the celebrity actually gets their own damn coffee.

โ€œItโ€™s something about the ritual of going to the store and carrying the coffee around in a paper cup,โ€ she said. โ€œItโ€™s just a caffeine delivery mechanism โ€” thereโ€™s nothing much to it, in and of itself. Itโ€™s the consumption, the publicness of it.โ€

Status symbol or drink of the Everyman, I think celebrities just like coffee. And if they can drum up some extra box office sales by throwing on an effortless pair of joggers and grabbing an iced latte, then I say good on โ€˜em.

And maybe celebrities are really more like us than we thought. Jk no theyโ€™re not those joggers cost like $400.

Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.

*top image via the Toronto Star

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