What mythic figure is shown in the Starbucks logo?

The mythic figure shown in the Starbucks logo is a siren.

Starbucks depicts a crowned, twin-tailed mermaid-like figure commonly identified by the company as a siren. In Greek mythology, sirens were dangerous beings associated with alluring song, though classical sirens were typically represented as part woman and part bird rather than as the fish-tailed figure seen on the cup. Starbucks uses the term in its own branding and storytelling.

The original logo appeared when Starbucks opened in Seattle in 1971. It showed a more explicit, brown-toned figure with visible twin tails. Later redesigns covered the figure’s torso with flowing hair, simplified the tails, and shifted the palette toward green. The current version, introduced in 2011, removed the surrounding wordmark and left the siren as the central symbol.

A common mix-up is calling the logo simply a mermaid or identifying it as a harpy, nereid, or naiad. Those are different mythological categories. Scholars have also debated whether the artwork reflects the medieval figure Melusine or imagery from older European woodcuts, but “siren” remains the standard Starbucks answer.