Want to smell like donuts? Beauty brands think you do

But in 2023, we’re moving from a food-inspired aesthetic to actually wanting it Look loves food, with trends like cinnamon-cookie butter hair, blueberry milk nails, and glazed donut crusts. Today, everything happens: velvet hair dye, pickle-flavored lubricantAnd Hellman’s mayonnaise perfume– the rule seems to be that the longer nothing changes, the better.

For Millennials and Zilennials, these products are a sensory throwback trip, reviving the candy-scented mall staples of our youth. For Gen Z, it’s a clash of high and low—a clean beauty brand like Native rubbing shoulders with a fast-food institution like Dunkin’.

So Happy Together

TikTok, with its algorithmic obsession with the absurd, has thrived on these edible beauty launches. The marketing strategy borrows liberally from the scarcity playbook of streetwear, deploying limited-edition drops designed to create urgency and exclusivity. But unfortunately, these products are not designed to last. They’re a hit with shoppers prone to FOMO and sentimentalists who want to romanticize their habits. For Gen Z, the more exotic a concept is, the faster it seems to spread.

Food and beverage (F&B) licensing is a lucrative avenue for these partnerships. According to Licensing International’s 2023 Global Licensing Industry StudyF&B grew at 5.3% and the cosmetics industry is dipping its manicured fingers into the pie. Everyone benefits from these symbiotic relationships, as food franchising uses the sharing capacity of #BeautyTok to take their brand into new markets.

The result is a syrupy cocktail of millennial nostalgia and Gen Z irony that generates free advertising through memes, TikTok reactions, and social media discourse.

So what’s next? Crunchwrap scented perfume? Hot Cheetos flavored toothpaste? Maybe the McRib collagen serum? As brands push the boundaries of absurdity, the question is not whether they have gone too far but when we reach the breaking point. Newness has an expiration date.

Without meaningful innovation, the joke risks falling flat, like some of these commercial franchise. But in the meantime, there’s a cautionary tale: The bottom line here is the consumer, not the product. We don’t want to wake up tomorrow smelling of Cheetos and pickles and realize we’re being kidded.