Unicorn food has been a thing for a while now. The brilliant, multi-hued, pastel-pink-blue-yellow trend hit social media feeds hard and set everyone’s fairy-princess hearts aflutter. Maybe you noticed a week ago when Starbucks released its five-day run of unicorn Frappucinos. (I saw someone holding one on the street, in the wild, and couldn’t stop staring.)
The blue stripe in any unicorn creation could very well owe its shade to Blue Majik, a blue-green algae that’s pretty all on its own. As a proprietary cousin to spirulina, Blue Majik has all of the touted algae’s enzyme, mineral, and B-vitamin properties with the added benefit of a sky-blue hue. And it’s been making its way into some of the more natural eye-catching drinks in town.
I Am the Juice Place downtown makes a tonic (I Am Magic) that pairs their house-extracted almond milk with blueberry tea and a dose of Blue Majik. The result, with its light berry flavor, is refreshing and absolutely lovely. (Yes, this is the place where they give their drinks names like I Am Iridescent, their vibrant dragonfruit smoothie I wrote about last summer.)
At Brewed + Pressed in the West Village, Island Milk is a coconut-water elixir, thick with a mixture of the meat and water. Pink salt picks up the flavors, and the dose of Blue Majik makes it look like the bottom of a swimming pool. (They also make a blue shake thick with frozen banana and activated raw almonds; I’ve written more about them here.)
I found a few Blue Majik-enhanced smoothies at JuiceLand in Sylvan Thirty, but these fall under the general embrace of their vast and dizzying drink list without necessarily making a point to unleash the full potential of the blue. Their Tikal smoothie is good, but it’s a shade of pale yellow-green from its primary ingredients of pineapple and mint. Another features Blue Majik mixed in with papaya and a slew of other fruity things. It’s blue in the way a bruise might be. You know the good stuff is in there, but it defies your best social media-shot aspirations.
Meanwhile, plug #bluemagik into an Instagram search and you get the kind of results you see below. Want to try conjuring the blue hues at home? Here’s a recipe for a blue latte from a trendy juice bar in Brooklyn. A quick Amazon purchase will have Blue Majik winging it’s way to you.
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