Sour Skittles Gummies

"Friends, Readers, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Skittles, not to praise them.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Skittles."

I'm paraphrasing Shakespeare here, but I feel like it holds up. I don't know how appropriate or relevant the quote is, it mostly just sounds cool. In the play, it's the opener for a pretty cutting monologue where Marc Antony yells irony at the audience from 1600 years in the past. Real "ain't shit changed" vibes, which was kind of Shakespeare's whole deal. And, now, from 400 years in the future you'd think he was right.

Or maybe not. I never thought I would mention the word Skittles on this blog: surely not in a title. Plus, I want to avoid negativity here usually, but sometimes a thing's true nature is revealed through its inverse. Sometimes, further, faults can be fixed stronger than if they were never broken. Or, as Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet, "Virtue turns vice, being misapplied, and vice sometime by action dignified."

That's right, it's a second Shakespeare quote.

What were we talking about? Skittles, right. Skittles are nice enough in isolation but essentially it's just an oblate spheroid of extreme sweetness. Inside the sugar shell is a tightly packed sugar sand that quickly breaks down into a chewy mush. Don't even get me started on Sour Skittles, which are as unpalatable but with the added coating of one of the most aggressive sour coatings available for a "normal" candy. If Sour Skittles were good at all, they might have made it here on their own, but they're essentially a gag gift for most of the population.

So, how did we get here? What makes this candy so different, and yes, so rad? I'll give a little bit of begrudging respect to Skittles because this does feel and taste like it's in the Skittles family. This isn't just some random gummy with a brand name slapped on; no, this feels like a real refinement and evolution of an idea.

There are five distinct flavors, which I can describe in brief, but I'm going to shortcut you there by mentioning a candy from the 1950s: orange slices. The grape tastes like grape-flavored orange slices,  and the same goes for lemon, green apple, and strawberry. This comparison was unlocked for me when I tried the orange flavor: almost indistinguishable from an orange slice candy. Each flavor has its own emblematic clean sweetness of a Skittle, but more pronounced, and one that retains its strength and identity without being washed out.

And if you eat them together, they retain their profile, combining in an additive quality rather than degrading to a homogeneous mush like normal Skittles are destined to do. The mild sourness is not destructive or caustic like it is in actual Sour Skittles; here it is more refreshing and pleasant. They're so much less sour than I was expecting, and while I would have been happy together in the middle, they're still incredibly rad as is.

Overall, despite some stickiness issues i ran into, the addictive quality of these, along with the improvement on the form factor and flavor profile of a classic (yet overrated) candy like Skittles, left a strong impression on me that will be getting me to try every other flavor they make.

I give it 90 radicals out of 100, and 4 hype out of 5, making it "super hype"