Starbucks Logo
What _is_ the Starbucks logo supposed to be? Is the female figure holding up coffee bags or what?

Those are her tails. She has two of them. The original logo accompanies this article, along with the newer, more abstract logo that is safe for children*.

Apparently she's supposed to be a "two-tailed siren", even though sirens in Greek mythology had bird features, not fish features. (In later stories sirens and mermaids were confused, probably because the word for mermaid in many languages looked like "siren".) But I can find no legend of a woman with two fish tails other than some variants of the legend of Melusine, with which I was previously unfamiliar.

Ah, here it is! Thanks to deadprogrammer.com (with some interesting observations on the sex appeal of mermaids) and the following quote found at brandautopsy:

"Terry [Heckler] also poured** over old marine books until he came up with a logo based on an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut: a two-tailed mermaid, or siren, encircled by the store’s original name, Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice. That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be as seductive as coffee itself."

The only information the Starbucks website has about the logo is the terms of using it on a web page. And the logo isn't even on that page.

*I'm always perplexed by people who insist that children be protected from the sight of bare breasts: who do they think breasts are for?

**Ack! He probably ruined those books with whatever he poured over them! (I guess it was coffee.) It would have been far more productive if he'd pored over them instead.