The two-tailed mythological figure in the Starbucks logo is a siren. Starbucks describes the image as a twin-tailed mermaid, or siren, drawing on the maritime imagery associated with the company’s Seattle origins and coffee-trading history.
The original 1971 logo showed a much more detailed figure with visible breasts and two fully extended fish tails. Later redesigns progressively covered or cropped those features. The logo became green in 1987, and the 2011 version removed the surrounding Starbucks wordmark while enlarging the central figure.
The image’s precise artistic source is debated. Starbucks has associated it with a 16th-century Norse woodcut, while researchers have linked it to older European imagery and questioned whether the figure should specifically be identified as Melusine. Those debates do not change the quiz answer: Starbucks itself has consistently called the logo’s character a siren. Gorgons, harpies, and naiads are different mythological beings and are not the figure represented by the brand.