Want to smell like donuts? Beauty brands think you do

But in 2023, we moved from food-inspired aesthetics to actual desire see Like food, with trends like cinnamon cookie butter hair, blueberry milk nails, and glossy donut skin. Today, anything goes: Velveeta hair dye, Dill-pickle-flavored lubeAnd Hellmann’s Parfum de Mayonnaise-The more unbreakable the rule seems, the better.

For millennials and millennials, these products are a sensory trip down memory lane, reliving 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, thrives on these edible beauty launches. The marketing strategy borrows liberally from streetwear’s scarcity playbook, implementing limited-edition drops designed to evoke urgency and exclusivity. But unfortunately, these products are not built to last. They’re flashpoints for FOMO-prone shoppers and sentimental people looking to romanticize their routines. For Gen Z, the stranger the concept is, the faster it seems to be spreading.

Food and beverage (F&B) licensing is a beneficial approach to these partnerships. According to Licensing International’s 2023 Global Licensing Industry StudyF&B grew by 5.3 percent, and the cosmetics industry is dipping its manicured fingers into the pie. Everyone benefits from these symbiotic relationships, as food franchises make use of the sharability #BeautyTalk To spread your branding into new markets.

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

So, what’s next? Crunchwrap-scented cologne? Hot Cheeto-flavored toothpaste? Maybe a MacRib collagen serum? As brands push the boundaries of the absurd, the question isn’t if they’ll go too far, it’s when we hit our breaking point. Innovation has a shelf life.

Without meaningful innovation, humor risks wearing thin, like some of these Franchises themselves. In the meantime, though, there’s a cautionary tale: The punch line here is the consumer, not the product. We don’t want to wake up tomorrow smelling like Cheetos and pickles and feel like the joke is on us.