Want to Smell Like Donuts? Beauty Brands Think You Do

But in 2023, we moved from food-inspired aesthetics to actually wanting to look like food, with trends like cinnamon cookie butter hair, blueberry milk nails, and glazed doughnut skin. Today, anything goes: Velveeta hair dye, dill-pickle-flavored lube, and Hellman’s parfum de mayonnaise—the rule seems to be the more unhinged, the better.

For millennials and zillennials, these products are a sensory trip down memory lane, 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, thrives on these edible beauty launches. The marketing strategy borrows liberally from streetwear’s scarcity playbook, implementing limited-edition drops designed to create urgency and exclusivity. But unfortunately, these products aren’t built to last. They’re flashpoints for FOMO-prone shoppers and sentimentalists looking to romanticize their routines. For Gen Z, the more bizarre the concept, the faster it seems to circulate.

Food and beverage (F&B) licensing is a lucrative avenue for these partnerships. According to Licensing International’s 2023 Global Licensing Industry Study, F&B grew by 5.3 percent, and the cosmetic industry is dipping its manicured fingers into the pie. Everyone benefits from these symbiotic relationships, as food franchises use the shareability of #BeautyTok to sprinkle their branding into new markets.

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

So, what’s next? Crunchwrap-scented cologne? Hot Cheetos-flavored toothpaste? Perhaps a McRib collagen serum? As brands push the boundaries of absurdity, the question isn’t whether they’ll go too far, it’s when we hit our breaking point. Novelty has a shelf life.

Without meaningful innovation, the joke risks wearing thin, much 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 realize that the joke’s on us.