Do you want to smell like donuts? Beauty brands think you do

But in 2023, we’ve moved from food-inspired aesthetics to an actual desire see like food, with trends like cinnamon cookie butter hair, blueberry milk nails and glazed donut skin. Today everything is possible: Velveeta hair dye, Lubricant with dill and cucumber flavorAnd Hellman’s mayonnaise flavor– The rule seems to be: the more unhinged, the better.

For Millennials and Zillennials, these products are a sensory trip down memory lane, reliving the candy-scented malls of our youth. For Generation Z, it’s a collision of highs and lows – a clean beauty brand like Native and a fast food institution like Dunkin’.

So happy together

TikTok, with its algorithmic obsession with the absurd, thrives on these edible beauty products. The marketing strategy is generously based on the scarcity principle of streetwear and implements limited drops that are intended to create urgency and exclusivity. But unfortunately these products are not built to last. They’re focal points for FOMO-prone shoppers and sentimentalists looking to romanticize their routines. For Generation Z, the more bizarre the concept, the faster it seems to spread.

Food and beverage (F&B) licensing is a lucrative opportunity for these partnerships. According to Licensing International’s 2023 Global Licensing Industry StudyF&B grew by 5.3 percent and the cosmetics industry is putting its manicured fingers in the cake. Everyone benefits from these symbiotic relationships as food franchises take advantage of the divisibility of #BeautyTok to spread 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? Eau de Cologne with a Crunchwrap scent? Hot Cheetos flavored toothpaste? Maybe a McRib collagen serum? When brands push the boundaries of absurdity, the question is not whether they go too far, but when we reach our breaking point. Novelty has a shelf life.

Without meaningful innovation, the joke risks losing meaning, similar to some of these Franchise companies themselves. In the meantime, however, there’s a cautionary tale: The point here is the consumer, not the product. We don’t want to wake up tomorrow smelling like Cheetos and pickles and realizing the joke is on us.