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If you get giddy over gummy bears, relish rock candy and savor every glandular pucker of a sour belt, then you’ll feel like Willy Wonka himself has handed you a Golden Ticket into the great big candy store in the sky.
The highly-anticipated Candytopia, an interactive candy art exhibit and Instagram trap (no judgment there), sold out engagements in Los Angeles and New York before arriving in San Francisco, where it debuts Thursday with 16,000 square feet of candy sculptures, rainbow-pooping winged pigs and a pool of fake marshmallows cozier than a Casper.
Tickets to the confectionery spectacle, which runs through Nov. 30 in a two-story building across the street from the Museum of Ice Cream, are $34 online. Weekends are nearly sold out, but if you’re a sucker for selfies and want to walk through a real-life Candy Land, snag a weekday ticket before they’re gone.
What is Candytopia exactly, and why do Gwyneth Paltrow, Wiz Khalifa and Chloe Moritz love it? It’s a dozen or so rainbow-bright rooms filled with sculptures, portraits, paintings and other art made entirely out of jelly beans, gummy bears, licorice, gum drops, rock candy and other nostalgic sweets.
The best part? Each piece is covered in shellac to preserve and protect it, so feel free to touch. Just don’t lick. If you want to indulge — sponsors had a feeling you would — there’s a treasure chest in each room filled with Pixy Stix, Tootsie pops, Crunch bars and other treats for eating. Take as many as you want.
Creator and L.A.-based head candy artist Jackie Sorkin is featuring the most popular installations from the original Santa Monica location, along with new Bay Area-inspired pieces unique to the San Francisco exhibit, including replicas of Golden State Warriors trophies and a portrait of Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Sorkin, who runs the candy-centric events company, Hollywood Candy Girls, teamed up with production designer Zac Hartog and retail veteran John Goodman, a longtime San Francisco resident. Sorkin created Candytopia for a simple reason: She loves candy, she says, and wants to make people happy.
“Everyone experiences sadness, loss and has those dark times, including me,” Sorkin said during a preview Tuesday. “I wanted to create a quirky space that’s escapist and provides that sensory overload for people to just let go and have fun.”
It starts with bubbly, sugar-high millennials dressed in Oompa Loompa-like white overalls. They greet and guide you throughout the exhibit, which starts in a prehistoric Candy Topia with a sharp-toothed dragon made of 125,000 pieces of red cherry cola bottles, black vines, Swedish fish and other candies.
Enter the wood-paneled library and you’ll find life-sized knight’s armor made of 21,000 gummy bears, and the bust of a female Roman warrior made of vanilla jelly beans, her blond curls — lemonade sour belts — twirled to perfection. Only 238 grams of sugar! Each creation comes with a placard of candy facts, including the sugar content and hours of construction. This one took 45 hours.
From there, ride the neon-lit escalator to a grass-filled playground, its red swings set against a backdrop of larger-than-life lollipops and toadstool benches, made of strawberry-shaped gummies and white licorice pastels. Take a load off — they’re comfortably squishy.
Next: An art gallery decked out with crystal chandeliers. You’ll spot a gummy bear sphinx, portraits of rapper Cardi B and crooner Tony Bennett and replicas of the Mona Lisa, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Munch’s The Scream. Rodin’s The Thinker is made entirely from margarita-flavored jelly beans. It sits on a stump of green-apple gummies and contains 25,000 grams of sugar. Ponder that for awhile.
Candytopia ends as you’d expect, with you diving into a vat of 250,000 foam marshmallows, giggling with abandon and taking far too many pictures of your family doing belly flops before settling into the soft white cubes, their faces, at least momentarily, without a care in the world.
