But in 2023, we’ve moved from aesthetics inspired by food to actually wanting See like food, with trends like cinnamon cookie butter hair, blueberry milk nails, and shiny donut skin. Now, anything goes: Velveeta hair dye, dill-pickle-flavored lubeand Hellman’s mayonnaise flavor– the rule seems to be the more useless, 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 battle of high and low—a clean beauty brand like Native rubbing shoulders with a fast food institution like Dunkin’.

So happy to be together

TikTok, with its algorithmic obsession with madness, thrives on this edible beauty launch. The marketing strategy borrows liberally from streetwear’s scarcity playbook, implementing limited-edition drops designed to create urgency and exclusivity. But unfortunately, these products are not made to last. These are flashpoints for shoppers prone to FOMO and sentimentalists looking to romanticize their routines. For Gen Z, the weirder the concept, the faster it circulates.

Food and beverage (F&B) licensing is a lucrative avenue for these partnerships. According to Licensing International’s 2023 Global Licensing Industry StudyF&B grew by 5.3 percent, and the cosmetics industry dipped its toes into the manipulated pie. Everyone benefits from these symbiotic relationships, as food franchises leverage the fragmentation of #BeautyTalk to spread their branding to new markets.

The result is a syrupy cocktail of millennial nostalgia and Gen Z irony that creates free advertising through memes, TikTok reactions, and social media discourse.

So, what’s next? Crunchwrap-scented cologne? Hot Cheetos-flavored toothpaste? Maybe a McRib collagen serum? As brands push the boundaries of vanity, the question isn’t whether they’ll go too far, it’s whether we’ve hit our breaking point. Innovation has a shelf life.

Without meaningful innovation, comedy risks wearing thin, as some of these franchise themselves. In the meantime, though, there’s a caveat: 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 the joke is on us.