At my seventh birthday party, my mother – dreading, I imagine, the prospect of another formless afternoon of children rampaging, buttercream-smeared and high on Sunset Yellow and musical chairs, through our small house – hired an entertainer. This was the early 1980s, long before these things were common, so I remember it with all the wonder of uncynical childhood: there was a rabbit, and also a cake, conjured from a hat, but somehow more magical still, because we were allowed to keep them, balloon sculptures. I mean that in the most basic sense: sausage dogs and swords, mainly. Mine, though, as birthday girl, was a red rocking horse and I was enraptured. I recall taking a bath that night with it sitting on the side, and putting it by my bed. Its slow wrinkling and demise, after one rocker popped, caused me real grief.
But now my rocking horse and its ilk are looking a bit saggy and wrinkled: our beloved blow-ups have had a glow-up. Animal sculptures are Old Balloon, along with the traditional packet of primary-coloured ovals, effortfully inflated and tied by apprehensive parents, pre-party, and just sort of tossed on the floor, perhaps rubbing one against a jumper to perform the never-not-funny static hair trick on a nearby child or tying a couple to the door knocker with string. Also Old Balloon: a single, or small bunch of foil “birthday girl”, “18 today” or L-plate helium-filled ones, dragged round streets and into bars, bobbing chaotically in the wake of a group of lairy revellers, eventually abandoned in a club queue, floating up, up and away.
Nearly 200 years since Michael Faraday first floured two sheets of rubber, stuck them together and inflated while experimenting with hydrogen in 1824, the global balloon market is big business: it was valued at $647.3m in 2020 and is predicted to grow at an average of 4.2% until 2026. What’s fuelling this balloon bubble? For one thing, balloons have got a whole lot prettier: the kind of installations you can see on the 11.2m #balloon Instagram tag or scrolling through Pinterest – spiritual home of the tasteful inflatable – come in tumbling, organically shaped installations featuring multiple sizes and muted colours, accessorised with flowers and feathers and other decorative elements. There are swooshes and waterfalls in 50 shades of grey, from the “workhouse” end of the Farrow & Ball colour chart, or in café au lait, blush, bronze and tawny rose, like a contoured Kardashian.
The Kardashians, unsurprisingly, have gone all-in on balloons: Khloe hosted an absolutely balloon-stuffed baby shower in February 2020, which is credited with taking contemporary balloon styling to the next level.
The most popular arrangements currently come in “dusky, Scandi colours”, according to Sahar Kasiri of Elari Events, but this season (Elari presents its take on the season’s colours in autumn to coincide with the catwalk shows) will also be about Palm Springs-inspired “yellows and purples, saturated sunkissed brights”. They would know: Elari is the absolute OG of balloon art in the UK. “We were one of the first in the UK to take it to a very stylish, fashionable level,” Kasiri tells me. She and her business partner, Aleksandra Rabbani, have created balloon art for star-studded events for Vogue and a range of luxury brands, plus pretty much anyone from a scripted reality show who has thrown a party or a baby shower in the four-and-a-half years since they launched. Elari’s work is spectacular: lavish and elaborate, with lush use of colour, thanks to “double stuffing” – putting one balloon inside another before you inflate, to create a bespoke gradient of shades. “We do a lot of experimental work double stuffing with different colours,” Kasiri explains. “We double stuff all our balloons, we never use single colours.”
The end results look vivid, airy and effortless, but they are the fruit of hard work, from planning and logistics to the toil of actually putting an installation together. “It’s very hectic; it’s a very physical job,” Kasiri says. “I’ve got to carry a lot of backdrops and blow up a lot of balloons to create these looks.” A modest installation in a home might take two to three hours of on-site blowing up and construction, in addition to the off-site prep time, double stuffing and loading.
But who are the grownups who want to say it with, and indeed pay for, balloons? Tray and Pete invested in a “huge balloon cascade” to decorate the exterior of the pub where they held their wedding reception. “Invested” is the right word: the primary-coloured installation cost £690, but the pictures convey the real blast of joy it created. “It looked great,” Tray says. “And achieved what we wanted by dressing the pub up so it looked like something special was happening. The guests loved it and there were plenty of them taking photos with it in the background.”
Kate, a civil servant, installed a white and gold balloon arch to celebrate her mother’s birthday. “I just love balloons,” she says. “They’re an over-the-top, guaranteed crowd-pleaser.” She’s a long-term balloon lover who has MS, so the fact that balloons are light is a key factor: “It means I can actually lift them.”
You might think Covid – no parties (except in Downing Street), no proms, no fun at all – would have popped the balloon bubble. Quite the contrary. As Kasiri says: “People were still pregnant, they were still having birthdays, baby showers… although they didn’t invite guests, they still wanted a backdrop so people could attend on Zoom or pop into the garden.” Elari pivoted to contactless deliveries of bike-sized backdrops, as a balloon arrangement became the consolation prize; a cheer-up for a cancelled celebration rather than the inflatable icing on the cake.
After all, nobody, as AA Milne said, can be uncheered by a balloon. Perhaps Milne had never met a globophobe: globophobia is the fear of balloons, and more particularly their popping. A mildly globophobic friend recalls a balloon-filled party with dread, as: “Horrible – that squeaky balloon squeak, then all the popping. I climbed on to the mantelpiece.” But balloons have become instant shorthand for “Gaiety, song-and-dance, here we are and there we are”, as Eeyore puts it, before learning his birthday balloon has popped, in Eeyore has a Birthday.
That image of a cheerful, bobbing pop of colour in a grey world is enduringly popular in visual culture: think of Audrey Hepburn holding a primary-coloured bunch in Funny Face; the house in Disney’s Up or Jeff Koons’s colossal shiny canines. The Instagram “balloon guy”, artist Michael Schneider, creates slogans generating varying degrees of controversy from brightly coloured foil letters against a wall (his 2021 “Fuck nudes, send me a dated invoice from your therapist” went down like a lead, well, you know). Banksy’s Girl with a Balloon was even voted Britain’s favourite work of art in 2017 (much to the disgust of art critic Jonathan Jones, who called it “sentimental tosh”).
Why does Kasari think we love balloons so much? “It brings out the kid in everyone,” she says. “There’s a feeling of nostalgia. Even when [clients] want it to be elegant, they love the idea of balloons.” Balloons aren’t gendered, she adds, they fill a space well and are “an easy thing to have around the house. A lot of things in decor can be quite subjective, but I feel like balloons are just balloons: it doesn’t offend anyone.”
They do offend, though. Like glitter, and straws, balloons are not the innocent, harmless party pleasure we used to think they were. As the campaigning group Balloons Blow highlights, while rubber latex – from which most balloons are made – is theoretically biodegradable, the timescale is alarmingly long: the group’s “backyard biodegradability test” is currently running at more than seven years. Analysis of seabird mortality in 2019 found that although latex balloons were far from the most common plastic ingested by seabirds, they were responsible for a much higher percentage of deaths: 1 in 5 birds found with a balloon in its stomach died from it. “They are attractive and they are disproportionately deadly if those balloons are eaten,” said one of the authors, Lauren Roman of the Australian national science agency’s Marine Debris Research group, when the paper was released.
There’s a whole additional set of problems when helium is involved (though many contemporary balloon structures are physically secured rather than dependent on helium to keep them afloat). Global reserves are dwindling alarmingly fast and helium has vital uses in medicine (not to mention being crucial for the functioning of the Large Hadron Collider). There are calls to ban its use for party purposes.
I wonder if their ephemerality is part of the magic of balloons. Joy is fleeting, helium-light, fragile; so are balloons. But I also wonder if perhaps they are becoming less fragile, and whether that might make them less problematic. “We don’t actually pop a lot of our balloons now,” Kasiri tells me when I ask about what happens to their installations post-party. “We either offer it to the client if they want to keep it, or we keep it in our warehouse for environmental reasons. We tend to reuse some of the balloons and make sure there’s no wastage, because we use high-quality balloons.”
My friend Helen’s experience corroborates this. She recently inherited a “10m-long” (possibly a slight exaggeration) Happy Birthday installation in balloon letters from a neighbour for her son’s birthday. Kept in a shed for six weeks, the balloons were, she said, “good as new” on the day. Afterwards, “I put it on the street WhatsApp group and they got about three more kid birthdays out of them. I would see parents trail the 10m happy birthday down the street in the night.” Like Eeyore, putting his popped balloon into his Useful Pot, and taking it out again, perhaps we can still have, and love, balloons, as long as we commit to keeping them.
