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In the early aughts, the beauty aisle doubled as a dessert menu. Bath & Body Works was churning out frosting-inspired mists, Lancôme’s Marshmallow Juicy Tube lip glosses lined the purses of teens and adults alike, and Jessica Simpson launched an entire line of edible body products that promised to taste as good as they smelled. (I can personally attest that they didn’t.)
While the era’s self-care routines were sugar-filled, its diet fads were decidedly sugar-free. Pro-anorexia forums thrived on LiveJournal, ads for workout programs and weight-loss pills dominated TV, and tabloids treated celebrity weight speculation like breaking news.
Fast forward 20 years, and we’ve somehow landed back in a strikingly similar cultural moment. After a fleeting moment in the 2010s, when the body-positivity movement gave us a glimmer of hope that beauty standards were finally broadening, the cultural celebration of thinness has returned with a vengeance. The resurgence started as a whisper with the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss medications like Ozempic and Wegovy and has since risen to a shout, reigniting the ultra-skinny ideal in a way we haven’t seen since the early aughts. Hashtags like #Y2KSkinny and #2000sSkinny climbed TikTok’s algorithm before the app started blocking searches for #SkinnyTok due to its glamorization of disordered eating (which, if you ask the experts, won’t help curb content that glorifies thinness or disordered eating).
All the while, I can’t help but notice that beauty, once again, is going all in on dessert. Scents of comfort—like vanilla, caramel, and tonka bean—have come back in full force just as diet culture has retightened its grip, a phenomenon I like to call “treat beauty.”
The rise of “treat beauty”
Food-scented beauty products have always existed, but they haven’t always occupied this much cultural and commercial real estate. Throughout much of the 2010s, fragrance trends skewed more seductive than edible: Spicy florals, musks, ambers, and earthy notes dominated perfume launches, with sweetness often playing a supporting role rather than the main event. Vanilla and other gourmand notes never wavered entirely, but in 2025, they moved decisively to center stage.
Right now, launches of dessert-themed fragrances are up 24% year over year, according to Mintel. In turn, gourmand notes like pistachio, milk, and honey have spilled over from perfume counters into body care, candles, and even makeup. “The trend now touches nearly every price point from personal fragrances to candles that evoke favorite foods and the memories attached to them,” says Linda G. Levy, president of the Fragrance Foundation.
In the back half of 2025 alone, Rhode Beauty celebrated Hailey Bieber’s birthday with limited-edition lip tints that smell—and taste—like tiramisu, vanilla soft serve, and crème brûlée (that’s on top of the numerous other glazed-donut-themed products she sells). Bath & Body Works’s Milk Bar collaboration turned the bakery’s best-selling confections into soaps and lotions, and Beekman 1802’s partnerships with Hershey’s and Libby’s promised "foodified" skin care inspired by chocolate bars and pumpkin pie.
"As we suppress our physical appetites, we subconsciously seek out new and different ways to satiate our senses."
The juxtaposition of all these little treat-themed products and our resurgent diet culture is jarring but not coincidental, if you ask nutritionist Jim LaValle, codirector of the Fellowship in Longevity Medicine at the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. “Traditional diet culture emphasized restraint and guilt. Now we’ve entered a ‘controlled indulgence’ era where the messaging is: You deserve a treat, just not one that affects your waistline,” he says. “Beauty brands have tapped into that psychology brilliantly, offering calorie-free luxury through serums, masks, and candles.”
According to LaValle, there’s an explanation for this: As we suppress our physical appetites, we subconsciously seek out new and different ways to satiate our senses—and lately, the beauty market has provided plenty to feast on.
The scent of substitution
Scientists call this phenomenon hedonic substitution. “If food no longer triggers that same emotional satisfaction—say, when someone’s appetite drops or they’re trying to avoid certain foods—the brain naturally seeks an alternate ‘feel-good’ stimulus,” LaValle says. “That might be through scent, texture, touch, or even achievement-based rewards. It’s the nervous system doing what it’s wired to do: maintain balance in reward signaling.”
If LaValle’s theory can explain why our brains reach for new sources of satisfaction, sensory science shows how. Research has shown that when people see beautiful images of food (otherwise known as “gastroporn”), it activates the brain’s reward pathways—especially the dopamine-driven anticipation circuits—even if it doesn’t replicate the full biochemical response of actually eating.
Smell does the same thing. “When people are hungry and see or smell something they love, there is a huge increase in brain activity—greater than what’s triggered by sex or pornography,” says Charles Spence, PhD, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, whose work focuses on consumer psychology, sensory marketing, and multisensory perception. “The biggest activations come not from eating but from anticipating food. Between 75 and 95% of what we taste actually comes from smell.”
That anticipatory thrill is what scented beauty products hijack so effectively. So much so that trend forecasters have started researching behavioral trends linked to hedonic substitution. Consumer trends firm InsightTrends, for example, has begun tracking what it calls “scent snacking” and even “disordered sniffing,” marketing terms meant to capture the practice of using fragrance, candles, body care, and other food-scented products as bite-sized hits of reward for the brain. Melissa Hago, a trend forecaster at WGSN, adds that “when food, time, or energy feel scarce, people look for micro-pleasures they can control. Right now, scent is one of the most accessible ways to do that.”
LaValle says that “these actions mimic the comfort of eating by engaging the same sensory and emotional circuits—scent, warmth, texture, anticipation, and routine,” but medical experts stress that catchy labels like these shouldn’t be mistaken for clinical reality. “Enjoying food-related scents on its own isn’t concerning,” says Lauren Hartman, MD, a board-certified pediatric and adolescent physician who specializes in eating disorders and body image. “What matters is the context—restriction, distress, rigidity, or guilt. Without that context, it’s simply a preference or a comforting ritual.”
“Instead of eating the cake, we buy the cream that smells like one. It’s the illusion of indulgence without the loss of control.”
Giving it a label like “disordered sniffing” is probably taking it a step too far, in fact. Hedonic substitution isn’t on the same psychological plane as impulse behaviors like emotional eating or stress shopping. “There are significant differences between these behaviors, and we don’t yet have research showing whether the comparisons hold up clinically,” Dr. Hartman says. “It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.”
Being drawn to gourmand-scented beauty products is not an indication that a person is restricting food or engaging in diet culture; plenty of people just like the way cookies and cake smell, and who could blame them?. But to me, the phenomenon of hedonic substitution only makes it clearer why food-themed beauty products would spike in popularity in tandem with the resurgence of weight-loss medications and dieting.
When self-care becomes self-control
Although brands aren’t explicitly advertising their food-themed products as dieting tools, the way they’re marketed feels strikingly familiar for those of us who remember 2000s diet culture, when similarly scented beauty products were advertised as being decadent, yummy, and indulgent. Victoria’s Secret’s recent holiday collection included a body cream that “feels like velvety-smooth, light, and fluffy cookie frosting.” The whipped cream-style applicator of Vacation’s beloved Classic Whip SPF 30 promises “perfect peaks” of sunscreen. Snif makes a perfume called Room for Dessert, which the brand says “feels like pure harmony and smells like crème brûlée spiked with strawberry, vanilla, and cedar.”
Regardless of the intent, this language can have an impact. “Because smell is invisible, we rely on cues—words, packaging, imagery—to decide what we’re perceiving,” says Rachel Herz, PhD, a neuroscientist who researches the psychological science of smell, and the author of Why You Eat What You Eat. “If a label says something is calming, indulgent, or delicious, we’re primed to experience it that way. It’s not fake; it’s mind over matter.”
This plays into why psychotherapist Alegra Torel, LCSW, believes the rise of food-themed beauty products is connected to the way women in particular have been conditioned to manage desire by diet culture. “Brands are going straight for the core of our emotional memory,” she says. “Food is sensory and tied to recall—birthday cakes, family holidays, that feeling of warmth and love. They’re not just selling comfort; they’re selling a return to safety.” But that safety often comes with a catch. “We’re taught to see sweetness as bad, forbidden, something to earn,” Torel adds. “So instead of eating the cake, we buy the cream that smells like one. It’s the illusion of indulgence without the loss of control.”
By that logic, today’s best-selling scents aren’t just standing in for eating. They’re offering emotional regulation in a bottle, regulation that for some people would otherwise come from food. That link between scent and emotion is hardwired. Smell has direct access to the brain’s emotional center—the amygdala and hippocampus—which is why it can instantly change your mood or evoke comfort. “No other sense connects as immediately to emotion and memory,” Herz says.
Where beauty goes from here
Even as brands highlight comfort and sensory pleasure on the surface, the timing of the gourmand boom is hard to separate from the broader cultural context. It’s more than mere 2000s nostalgia: the rise of “treat beauty” mirrors this moment when pleasure—especially sweet, “indulgent” pleasure—is increasingly redirected and reframed as shameful. Though the behavior of hedonic substitution itself isn’t inherently harmful, my concern lies in the messaging. If scent continues to be framed as a guilt-free indulgence, it risks reinforcing the idea that actual indulgence is something to be managed.
But this moment also presents an opportunity. As brands experiment with scent as a tool for mood and mental health—collaborating with neuroscientists, creating “functional fragrances,” and reframing pleasure as wellness rather than a temptation to be resisted—the industry has a chance to rewrite its relationship with desire. If it continues down that path, there’s hope that the next era of fragrance won’t be about curbing our relationship with pleasure, but learning to reconnect with it.
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