The British investor St. John Harmsworth acquired a natural, carbonated mineral spring in Vergèze, France, naming the source 'Perrier' after the local physician Louis Perrier who had conducted early health studies on the water. Packaging the naturally effervescent water in a highly unique, distinctive green glass bottle modeled after Indian clubs, Harmsworth marketed the beverage across the British Empire as the ultimate elite symbol of colonial hygiene, sparkling health, and sophisticated cosmopolitan dining, establishing the international bottled water market.

The green Perrier bottle quickly evolved into an iconic visual marker for elite class status, consumer vanity, and high-society preening within twentieth-century drawing-room and satirical poetry. Poets utilized the sparkling, expensive green bottle in their verses to construct sharp, humorous critiques of the rising superficiality, health obsessions, and material excessive wealth of the urban upper-middle class.