Now that the holidays are officially here, so are the seasonal Coca-Cola cans that feature the iconic polar bears.
While the holiday soda cans seem like nondescript household items, they actually contain hidden messages that can easily go unseen—unless one takes a closer look.
From their eyes and eyelashes to their noses, the polar bears on the cans carry secret symbols that seem shockingly obvious once the sneaky signs are pointed out.
Can you spot them all? Coca-Cola’s iconic holiday-themed cans are here—and it turns out they have hidden symbols all over them
Secret: Upon closer inspection, it turns out the polar bears have bottle caps instead of eyes, and the white mark on their nose is shaped like a Coke bottle
First off, the eyes on the polar bears are not just little black dots. When taking a closer look, they are actually upside-down bottle caps like those found on old-fashioned glass Coke bottles.
Thus, the rim of the bottle cap stands in as the bears’ eyelashes as part of the clever design.
There is also more than meets the eye when it comes to the animals’ noses, specifically the little white mark on them.
At first glance, it seems as though their noses are simply shining from from the cold and the snow. But that little white mark is actually shaped like a small glass Coca-Cola bottle.
When the bears are drawn from the side, some of them even have the trademark Coca-Cola ribbons in lieu of a mouth.
Eyes: Illustrator Noma Bar, who created the Coca-Cola bears, explained that the Coke crowns that replace the bear’s eyes helped make the animals more expressive
Nose: At first, it looks as though the bears’ noses are glistening from the cold and snow, but it turns out the mark was just a clever way to insert one more Coke bottle into the design
The polar bears, which made their debut in a 1993 commercial titled Northern Lights, were created by illustrator Noma Bar and have since been a Coca-Cola tradition.
Frederic Kahn, the design director of Coca-Cola, previously shared on the brand’s website that the hidden symbols were placed there intentionally to help signal the brand’s identity.
‘We wanted to keep the same look and personality while creating a more graphic illustration style that would be easy to print around the world,’ he said.
‘We also wanted to embed signature Coca-Cola elements so the Coca-Cola polar bears could immediately be recognizable as our asset.’
Bar also shared how much thought went into the bears during the design process.
‘When I started to sketch a group of polar bears, I realized that I was not just drawing bears, but landscapes as well,’ he said.
‘So I treated them as curvy snowy landscapes… in some places the silver curves create a Coca-Cola bottle.’
The bottle motif, he explained, especially the Coke crowns, helped him bring life to the bears.
‘Bending and flipping the crown allowed the bear to be more expressive,’ the illustrator added, ‘and even helped me to define the bear’s gender’.