Why food-scented beauty is the trend we can’t stop craving

Lately, beauty smells like food. Lip balms taste of chai, body washes of cake, serums of fruit and milk. Food-scented beauty has arrived, and what seems playful at first feels more like a craving, a confession. We’re tired, and we want pleasure to be simple again.

A few years ago, you couldn’t scroll through a feed without being told to glow. Now, we want to smell like comfort, a vacation or a bakery. Vanilla, caramel, saffron, rose milk. The line between body and appetite has blurred, and it feels oddly natural. Maybe this is what happens when an industry runs out of ways to promise transformation. It starts to promise tenderness instead.

When your moisturiser smells like mango pulp, it doesn’t just soften your skin. It reminds you that sweetness still exists somewhere, even if it arrives in a jar. These products work because they make tenderness something you can buy. Care used to mean time, touch and conversation. Now it arrives pre-scented and shelf-ready. We have learned to outsource softness to texture and smell because human gentleness feels unreliable.

Dr Ritu Sharma, professor of marketing and market researcher, calls this a level up in sensory branding. She’s right, but that phrase feels too clean for what’s really happening. This feels less like strategy and more like longing, rebranded as luxury. When everything around us feels transactional, something that delights for no reason at all feels like a small rebellion.

And maybe scent feels radical now because everything else has become too loud. Our screens scream colour and movement, but our attention keeps thinning. We live inside stimulation that no longer stimulates. You can’t scroll a smell. You can’t swipe it away. For a few seconds, you’re forced back into your own body, reminded that you still live inside it.

It makes sense that Gen Z, fluent in aesthetics, would take to food-scented beauty faster than anyone else. They want skincare that feels alive, that looks like fun and smells like memory. A gloss that smells like bubble tea, a cream that recalls a bakery you’ve never been to. The product becomes a souvenir for a feeling you’ve never had but would like to.

And somewhere beneath all this sweetness, there’s hunger. For women, indulgence has always needed permission. Food-scented beauty gives it in a way dessert never could. You can crave something without guilt because it disappears when you’re done. You can want sweetness without tasting it. It’s desire made safe, the kind that fades before anyone can call it too much.