The intricacies of Crystal Light

As a result of the South Beach diet we’re not really on, I have been drink­ing a lot of Crys­tal Light lately (yay, Aspar­tame!).  I flirted with Crys­tal Light a num­ber of years ago, mostly with the “Nat­ural Lemon­ade” fla­vor (which is far from nat­ural, but pleas­antly sour and cloy­ingly sweet, btw), but we’re drink­ing the whole Kool-Aid, as it were, this time.  There are a num­ber of Crys­tal Light fla­vors avail­able, as well as the pseudo-healthy vitamins/energy/herbal tropes that seem to be squeez­ing water off the $2.00-a-bottle shelf.  So we’ve been doing this for about four or five months now, and a thing I noticed right at the begin­ning has only now crys­tal­ized (if you’ll allow me that pun) in my mind.

While each indi­vid­ual Crys­tal Light pack­age is the same size (a lit­tle foil­ish tube) they are filled with dif­fer­ent amounts of pow­der for dif­fer­ent fla­vors.  That is, I would have expected a fake fla­vor­ing change to involve just chang­ing the “fla­vor crys­tals,” but it appears that they have to change other stuff, too, enough that the Blue­berry White Tea tubes are packed to the gills, and the White Grape seems to have just a puff of dust in it.

There are intri­ca­cies to the mak­ing of Crys­tal Light that I had not pre­vi­ously suspected.

To wit, from the boxen:

So, the Nat­ural Lemon­ade has almost three times the pow­der of the White Grape.  I leave it to you to rumi­nate on the impli­ca­tions of this for world peace, party unity, and/or the future of the pack­ag­ing industry.

Speak­ing of the pack­ag­ing indus­try.