Women Can Have the Cake. We’re Just Not Supposed to Eat It.

For the past year, I've noticed something I can't seem to unsee. Every beauty campaign suddenly looks like a dinner table.

I saw a sunscreen advertisement with the brand's name carved into a block of butter. Then came moisturizers piped like whipped cream, perfumes that smelled like vanilla cake, glazed donut skin, strawberry girl makeup, blueberry milk nails, latte makeup. Somewhere along the way, beauty stopped borrowing from fashion and started borrowing from food. Everything suddenly became edible.

As children, that language made sense. The sweetest things were the things we wanted to eat. Strawberries tasted like summer, vanilla meant birthday cake, chocolate meant comfort. If something looked delicious, eventually, you got to taste it. Desire had somewhere to go.

Now, it feels like we're only supposed to look. Just as beauty started speaking the language of desserts, our bodies started shrinking again. Skinny is back. Fashion Week silhouettes have  quietly become smaller, celebrity bodies have become noticeably thinner, and social media has embraced a new wave of aspirational slimness that feels eerily familiar. We spent years pretending eating disorders were just another aesthetic, romanticizing fragility until we almost forgot how many people never recovered from it. Yet somehow, at the exact same moment, every campaign around us is asking us to think about food.

Not eating it. Thinking about it.

Open TikTok for five minutes and you'll see the contradiction unfold in real time. Endless mukbangs, oversized cookies being pulled apart in slow motion, melting butter, dripping honey, glossy strawberries, creators filming themselves eating enough food for five people while algorithms reward every second of it. Then, without missing a beat, another impossibly thin girl applies a lip balm that smells like cinnamon rolls, a body mist inspired by caramel popcorn, or a moisturizer marketed with whipped cream aesthetics. Even products that have absolutely nothing to do with food are photographed next to cherries, butter, cream, peaches, pastries or bowls of berries, as if looking edible has become the highest form of beauty.

It's a strange cultural contradiction. We're expected to smell like sugar, look like frosting, have cherry lips and glazed skin, but we're also expected to take up less space than ever before. Beauty has become obsessed with appetite while remaining terrified of consumption. Maybe that's because the product was never food. The product is craving.

Nobody is actually telling us to eat.

They're telling us to crave.

And maybe that's the most successful marketing strategy of all. Because the ideal consumer isn't the one who's full. It's the one who's always hungry.

Maybe that's exactly why food marketing has become so dominant. Around the same time beauty started looking edible, Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications—originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes—became cultural phenomena, glamorized by celebrities and influencers as shortcuts to weight loss. Over the past two years, bodies have become noticeably smaller, yet diet culture has never really disappeared. If anything, it simply changed its aesthetic.

The timing feels almost too perfect to ignore. The thinner we're expected to become, the more the world around us starts speaking the language of food. Butter. Honey. Cherries. Cream. Vanilla. Caramel. It's as if culture has decided that if we can't indulge physically, we should at least indulge visually.

Maybe that's because modern marketing no longer needs us to make a purchase the moment we see a product. It needs something much more valuable first: our desire. Our attention. Our craving.

In a way, culture is delivering two completely opposite messages at once. Don't eat—but never stop thinking about food. Stay as small as possible—but smell like vanilla cake. Have glazed donut skin, cherry lips, butter-yellow clothes and caramel perfume, but don't indulge in the things they're asking you to imagine. It's an impossible bargain.

Of course, this isn't entirely new. Beauty standards have always moved in cycles. The waif-like silhouettes of the 1920s, Twiggy's frame in the 1960s, heroin chic in the 1990s—every generation seems to rediscover the fantasy of taking up less space. What's different now is the language surrounding it. Thinness has returned, but this time wrapped in butter, berries, whipped cream and frosting.

Naomi Wolf argued in The Beauty Myth that beauty standards are most profitable when women are kept busy feeling inadequate—hungry, self-conscious and endlessly trying to become a better version of themselves. The message hasn't changed. It has simply become more palatable.

I still remember buying a cola gummy lip balm during one of the strictest diets I'd ever been on. The moment I applied it, all I could think about was cola gummies. The craving became so intense that I felt like I had two options: either buy the candy or eat the lip balm itself. I ended up finishing two whole bags of cola gummies that day. At the time, I blamed myself. Years later, I realized I had misunderstood what was actually happening.

The periods when I struggled the most with disordered eating were also the periods when I wanted to smell like dessert. Vanilla body mists, caramel perfumes, chocolate-scented bronzers, lip balms that tasted like candy. Looking back, I don't think that was a coincidence. The more I deprived myself of the foods I wanted, the more I surrounded myself with reminders of them. 

The surprising part came later. Once my relationship with food became healthier, my taste in fragrance changed too. I stopped reaching for gourmand scents and found myself drawn to greener, cleaner, woodier perfumes instead. It made me wonder whether I had ever genuinely loved smelling like vanilla and caramel, or whether I had simply been hungry all along.

That question sent me down a rabbit hole. One of the most well-established findings in eating disorder research is that restriction doesn't just affect what we eat—it changes what we think about. When the brain is consistently deprived of food, it becomes increasingly preoccupied with it. The more forbidden a food becomes, the more psychological space it occupies.

Maybe that's why today's beauty landscape feels so strangely familiar. In a culture that still rewards thinness, we've become surrounded by products that smell, look and sound like desserts. 

It turns out this phenomenon has a name. Long before TikTok existed, writers were already describing our obsession with looking at food as gastroporn—or food porn. The term first appeared in 1977 to describe food imagery so indulgent and seductive that simply looking at it became part of the pleasure. You weren't necessarily meant to eat it. You were meant to desire it.

That idea feels surprisingly modern. Researchers have suggested that repeated exposure to highly desirable food imagery can create a form of visual hunger. According to the theory of priming, simply seeing food can activate cravings without us consciously realizing it.The mechanism feels oddly familiar. Restrict. Crave. Feel guilty. Repeat.

Except now, the cycle doesn't always begin with food itself. Sometimes it begins with a lip oil that smells like cinnamon rolls, a body lotion photographed next to whipped cream, or a skincare campaign styled like a bakery. We're no longer just consuming images of food—we're consuming beauty through the language of food.

Maybe that's why these campaigns feel so irresistible. They're not simply selling skincare or perfume. They're activating the same appetite they never intend to satisfy. Maybe the biggest luxury today isn't eating cake. It's smelling like it. Because modern beauty doesn't want us to feel full. It wants us to stay hungry. After all, hunger is far more profitable than satisfaction.

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 Photo © Photograph via Pinterest (@pinterest)