Juicy Salif

The Juicy Salif is a citrus squeezer, but hardly anyone buys it to squeeze lemons. It was designed by the Frenchman Philippe Starck in 1990 for Alessi and became one of the icons of late twentieth-century design, held in the collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A sketch on a napkin

Its slender, slightly alien shape was inspired by a squid. Alberto Alessi recalled receiving from Starck a napkin with a few stains, probably tomato sauce, and a series of sketches of squid: from left to right they gradually took on the shape of the squeezer. Starck had drawn it in a restaurant, while squeezing a lemon over a plate of squid.

How it is made

The Juicy Salif is made of cast and polished aluminium, 29 centimetres tall, with a ribbed body on three long legs. You place the glass between the legs and press half a lemon on the tip: the juice runs down the ribs and drips into the glass. More than a utensil, it is a small kitchen sculpture.

An object to get people talking

Starck has said that his squeezer is “not meant to squeeze lemons” but “to start conversations”. For its tenth anniversary Alessi produced 10,000 gold-plated, numbered pieces, with a warning not to use them with fruit, because the acid would damage the plating. By 2003 more than half a million had been sold. It has been loved and criticised in equal measure: the psychologist Donald Norman put it on the cover of his book Emotional Design, while others cite it as an example of bad design. That very ambiguity makes it a symbol of Postmodernism, when household objects also became play and storytelling.

Sources

• Juicy Salif – Wikipedia