Pretty Enough to Eat: Behind Beauty’s Food Obsession

When Milk Make-up launched its Cooling Water Jelly Tint in February, with the tagline: “Color so juicy, it’s virtually ok to eat,” the group anticipated it to create buzz on-line, stated Dianna Ruth, Milk Make-up’s co-founder and head of product improvement.

They didn’t, nevertheless, anticipate that the lip and cheek stain, which encompasses a jelly-like texture and cooling sensation when utilized, to go as viral because it did on TikTok, with some creators taking that tagline to coronary heart, by taking a literal chunk out of the product.

“Are you able to blame me although? It appears to be like like grape jelly and kool help,” creator Hannah Cho stated on TikTok. Movies concerning the product, which offered out twice on Sephora inside two weeks and presently has a waitlist of over 45,000 buyers, have racked up thousands and thousands of views on the platform — Cho’s alone has 3 million.

Milk is simply the most recent model to make use of meals — particularly candy treats — to promote cosmetics. In 2023, a number of of the main magnificence developments that emerged from TikTok had been named after meals. There was strawberry lady make-up (closely pink eyes and cheeks); glazed doughnut nails (sheer with lots of shimmer) and cinnamon cookie butter hair (brown with caramel and copper undertones), simply to call a number of.

The affiliation between magnificence and meals might be traced all the best way again to Historical Egypt, when Cleopatra popularised kohl eyeliner, which counts burnt almonds as an ingredient. Extra lately, Lip Smackers’ fruit-flavoured lip glosses and balms had been a staple for Millennial shoppers within the aughts.

The pattern’s most up-to-date iteration is fuelled by elevated engagement with meals and beverage content material on platforms like TikTok, with #FoodTikTok having amassed over 112 billion views. The platform’s foodie group is as a lot a driver of fleeting developments as is magnificence and trend. (Baked feta pasta and ‘sleepy lady’ mocktails are examples of developments which have gained virality on the app.) In response, magnificence manufacturers are launching merchandise that resemble meals — normally desserts — or are advertising their assortment alongside precise sweet, like gummy bears and gum drops. To drive additional dialog amongst Gen-Z buyers, labels are partnering with meals firms, like Rhode Pores and skin’s team-up with Krispy Kreme and Too Confronted’s collaboration with Pop-Tarts.

It’s not a fool-proof technique: Magnificence Bakerie, which structured their complete catalogue round merchandise that seemed like baked items, together with its Face Flour Baking Powder and Matte Lip Whips lipsticks, shuttered in April. The trick is to capitalise on food-centric developments with out banking on them solely.

“When ‘glazed doughnut’ was at its peak, gross sales of highlighters ticked up as did dewy serums,” stated Larissa Jensen, senior vp and world magnificence business advisor at Circana. “It’s positively working.”

Hopping on the Development

TikTok, with its exact algorithm churning content material at excessive speeds, has birthed magnificence developments with little or no endurance. Within the span of six months, the platform had launched the strawberry lady pattern, characterised by a closely blushed and freckled face, latte make-up which sports activities brown lip liner and heavy use of bronzer, in addition to blueberry milk nail pattern, characterised by a pale blue nail color.

What these food-centric magnificence developments, like latte make-up and blueberry milk nails, have in widespread is that they’re extra a reinvigoration and rebranding of make-up strategies that exist already, in accordance with TikTok creator Mandy Lee, identified on-line as “Outdated Loser In Brooklyn,” who breaks down developments on her account.

“A singular line of sameness can represent a pattern on TikTok,” she stated. “Tendencies used to have subcultures hooked up to them and had been rooted in a shared historical past.”

However tapping into the cultural second — even when it’s fleeting — can generate buzz and gross sales, particularly from Gen-Z and Gen Alpha buyers for whom social media serves as their major supply of knowledge when making make-up buying selections, in accordance with knowledge from Circana.

What which means, nevertheless, is that the elevate for manufacturers to take part in these developments is far lighter — they solely must replace the advertising of their current catalogue to answer the second.

For lip care model Lanolips, tapping into the glazed doughnut pattern was so simple as introducing a glazed doughnut flavour of their 101 Ointment Multi-Balm, one in every of their hero merchandise. The product shortly grew to become a prime SKU for the label, promoting out in a month on its web site.

“Meals and wonder each have this sensorial expertise, it’s virtually like an indulgence in a approach skincare isn’t,” stated Kirsten Carriol, founder and chief govt of Lanolips. “The ointment is supposed to hydrate the lips however that may get boring. Including flavours has been a sport changer for us and the flavoured ointment vary now makes up 30 % of our enterprise.”

Even when a model can’t replace a present product, it will probably nonetheless spotlight how their current providing can be utilized to faucet right into a pattern. For instance, in 2023, gross sales for lip balm, a staple of the ‘glazed doughnut’ look, reached $285 million, an 85 % soar from the earlier yr, in accordance with knowledge from Circana. And gross sales for blush, essential for shoppers eager to mess around with the strawberry lady or tomato lady developments, peaked at $426 million, a rise of 60 % year-over-year.

The Proper Mixture of Collaborators

For magnificence manufacturers who wish to make a much bigger guess on the meals pattern, product collaborations have proved to be an efficient software.

Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Pores and skin, for example, partnered with Krispy Kreme to create a strawberry flavoured model of the label’s best-selling peptide lip therapy. The collaboration elevated engagement in Rhode’s social channels by 715 %, in accordance with retail analytics agency Trendalytics. Since then, Rhode has doubled down on meals associations, launching tinted variations of the lip peptide therapy in shades like espresso, jelly bean and toast, with advertising to match.

For E.l.f Magnificence, collaborations with meals firms are a approach for the enterprise to entry a brand new buyer base that will not have essentially heard of the model, or encourage current clients to interact with merchandise they’re accustomed to in a brand new approach, stated Kory Marchisotto, E.l.f Magnificence’s chief advertising officer.

In 2021, E.l.f. teamed up with fast-casual Mexican-inspired restaurant Chipotle on a make-up palette that resembled the restaurant’s meeting line of beans, rice and guacamole, and in April, it partnered with canned water model Liquid Loss of life on a set of heavy metal-inspired make-up, together with a black lipstick and heavy eyeliner.

“For any collaboration we do, we have to examine the field that the model is a challenger in its class, and the second field is humour,” stated Marchisotto. “Once I take into consideration E.l.f and what our group is, they provide us permission to be enjoyable and humorous.”

The enjoyable issue is core to magnificence’s embrace of meals. Past driving gross sales, it’s a approach for magnificence manufacturers to present their clients one thing lighthearted to speak about.

“Within the 2010s, make-up grew to become actually critical. You needed to contour and bake and add false lashes,” stated Arionne Nettles, a Chicago, Illinois-based educator. “This pattern seems like a return to a time when make-up felt enjoyable and fewer intimidating.”

Signal as much as The Business of Beauty newsletter, your complimentary, must-read supply for the day’s most essential magnificence and wellness information and evaluation.