How sweetness became beauty’s shortcut to desire

At 175 years old, Kiehl’s could have celebrated its pharmacy heritage. Instead, it made its Lip Balm #1 smell like cereal milk frozen swirl, buttercream birthday cake and red velvet truffle. Its July collaboration with New York bakery Milk Bar also gave their Crème de Corps body cleanser a cereal-milk scent, putting one of skincare’s oldest names inside the vocabulary of a dessert counter. Weeks earlier, Kiehl’s had worked with Go Greek Yogurt on a frozen yogurt bowl tied to its Better Screen SPF range. In Shanghai, Kérastase took over bakery Bebaked, while Valentino Beauty turned the design-led snack retailer I’m Snack into a “chocolate workshop” around its fall chocolate-toned makeup. Armani Beauty, meanwhile, launched Dolci Blush in shades including caramel, apricot and cinnamon. Beauty has always borrowed from food, but what is changing is the breadth and strategic weight of the idea. Milk, honey, strawberry, pistachio, caramel and cake are moving across fragrance, makeup, skincare, haircare and retail, becoming recurring components of how brands build product worlds rather than occasional novelty cues. The timing is commercially convenient: In 2025, consumer interest in gourmand fragrances rose 57.6% year-on-year in Spate’s data and marshmallow perfume jumped 91.7%. Spate’s 2026 analysis shows vanilla, pistachio, honey and chocolate among the food notes posting some of the largest increases in fragrance engagement. A language consumers can almost taste Food solves a problem beauty has never fully escaped online: texture, scent and sensorial payoff are difficult to communicate through a screen. A serum can be called silky, a blush creamy and a lip treatment glossy, but those adjectives increasingly blur together. Show honey stretching from a spoon or glaze running over a doughnut, and the consumer already has a reference point for how the product might feel. “Sensory marketing works. Food associations are genuinely more concrete than plain descriptive language,” said Laurence Lim, founder and managing director of Cherry Blossoms Intercultural Branding. “For example, conjuring up a dessert’s molten, oozing center is much more vivid than simply calling a product ‘silky smooth.’” Moqian Sun, founder of marketing and consulting firm The Harvest, sees the same advantage. “Milk suggests softness and comfort, honey evokes nourishment, fresh fruit feels vibrant, while desserts bring to mind indulgence, pleasure and comfort,” she said. Yet, she cautions that this sensory shorthand should not be confused with genuine product understanding: food imagery can suggest whether something is rich, silky or creamy, but its bigger power is “creating emotional appeal and encouraging social sharing, rather than helping consumers genuinely understand a product’s efficacy.” The industry has spent years escalating claims around actives, concentrations and proprietary technology; sweetness offers a different route into the same product, one that is less instructional and more instinctive. It can turn sunscreen into frozen yogurt, lip balm into birthday cake and brown lipstick into chocolate before a consumer has absorbed a single ingredient claim. The commercial stakes are visible in brands that have made edible sensory codes part of their identity. Sol de Janeiro, whose best-known scents revolve around notes such as pistachio, vanilla and salted caramel, became Sephora’s top-selling brand in 2024 and generated roughly $780 million in annual sales. Rhode generated $212 million in net sales in the 12 months ending March 2025 before E.L.F. Beauty agreed to acquire it in a deal worth up to $1 billion. Those figures do not prove dessert imagery was their growth engine, but they show how commercially powerful highly recognizable sensorial brand worlds can become. When sweetness becomes brand equity Gisou offers a clearer example of food becoming something more durable than campaign styling. Founder Negin Mirsalehi comes from six generations of beekeepers, while the brand sources key honey ingredients from the family’s Mirsalehi Bee Garden in the Netherlands, giving its honey-centered formulations and storytelling a direct connection to the brand’s origins. “For Gisou, honey is the origin of the brand, and for Rhode, ‘glazed’ is its language,” Lim said. “When food partnerships are repeated, they must be consistent with the brand’s product, branding and image, otherwise they weaken its identity.” Sun draws the same line between brands that own a code and those borrowing one. “Brands jumping on the trend often simply borrow a sweet visual formula: strawberries, milky packaging and sugary fragrances,” she said. “Without a corresponding story, ingredient credentials or consistent brand identity, the concept lacks depth and could easily be replaced by the next passing trend.” Food also plays differently across markets. In the US, Lim said, it often connects to comfort, reward and nostalgia; in China, food is a shared social experience and can carry associations with care and nourishment. Tea, bakery and café culture give beauty brands abundant settings for activations, but the flavor codes themselves do not necessarily travel unchanged. Despite those differences, Lim sees a wider emotional driver behind the turn toward desserts. “Gen Z shares a quiet consensus: life is hard, and bitter in all kinds of ways, so they reach for sweetness across every part of their lives to balance it out,” she said. That does not mean more sweetness is always better. As Lim points out that one of the highest compliments Chinese consumers can give a dessert is that it is “not sweet.” A cinnamon-roll reference that works in the US or Europe may have relatively little cultural traction in Asia, while heavy artificial sweetness can feel cloying rather than comforting. She sees more room for brands to develop food language from tea, herbal ingredients and traditional Chinese medicine-inspired food and drink, particularly for beauty companies that already have herbal credentials. As imported strawberry-and-cake aesthetics become easier to replicate, culturally specific food references may ultimately provide brands with a more defensible point of difference. Can old brands borrow the sugar rush? For heritage brands, the opportunity is to use food to lower the distance between an established name and younger consumers without allowing the collaboration to overpower the authority that made the brand valuable in the first place. Kiehl’s illustrates that balance: the Milk Bar partnership made familiar products more playful, while leaving the brand’s underlying skincare identity intact. But Lim cautions luxury brands: “The risk of eroding the aura and prestige of Western luxury brands is real.” This is especially true in China, where international luxury companies have been using cafés and food partnerships to localize at the same time that Chinese brands have been moving upmarket. Valentino Beauty’s I’m Snack tie-up offers one way to keep the connection tight. Its Shanghai “chocolate workshop” was built around the brand’s Autumn Memories chocolate makeup collection, with drinks, snacks and the store environment reinforcing an existing color story rather than attaching an unrelated food experience to the product. For Amber Wu, a marketing consultant, the risk stays relatively low when collaborations remain “limited-edition, temporary and playful” and both the products and packaging still feel premium. Sun is more cautious about frequency: too many collaborations can produce visual and consumer fatigue while obscuring the ingredient expertise, dermatological credentials or product performance that made a heritage brand valuable in the first place. As more brands adopt the same visual and olfactory vocabulary, sameness may become the larger problem. “Very quickly,” Sun said when asked how fast the strategy could become commoditized. “Sweet, milky and honey-inspired aesthetics risk becoming generic, interchangeable templates.” Food can make an unfamiliar texture instantly legible, turn an ordinary shade into a craving and give a clinical product a social life outside the bathroom. But once every lip oil is glazed, every body mist smells edible and every pop-up serves cake, sweetness stops being differentiated. The advantage will belong to brands that can make the food reference feel proprietary — or know when to leave dessert off the menu. “In the end, product performance and quality remain the key to long-term success,” said Wu.

How sweetness became beauty’s shortcut to desire

TUMI’s new growth playbook: From travel expertise to lifestyle performance

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How sweetness became beauty’s shortcut to desire

TUMI’s new growth playbook: From travel expertise to lifestyle performance