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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’.
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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.
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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.
