From Japanese purple rice and black tea to grapes, figs and prickly pear, some of the most talked-about beauty products right now sound as though they belong on a menu.
There is something delicious happening in beauty.
Skincare and makeup shelves are increasingly filled with ingredients more familiar from the kitchen than the cosmetics counter. There is fig balm, banana cream, watermelon cheek colour, black tea moisturizer, purple rice face cream and skincare built around grapes and vines.
Some of this is playful. Some of it is rooted in longstanding botanical research. And some of it is very clever marketing.
What makes the trend interesting is how differently brands are using the language of food. At one end, colourful products lean into fruit, texture and dessert-like names. At the other, luxury skincare brands take ingredients such as tea, rice and grapes and build sophisticated formulations and origin stories around them.
The result is a beauty category that increasingly looks, smells and even reads like a menu.
The fruit bowl moves to the vanity
Glow Recipe may be one of the clearest examples of food-inspired beauty.
The brand has made watermelon, plum, avocado and strawberry part of its identity, and its latest products continue the theme. Its Glass Balm Lip Treatment comes in shades including Fig Bingsoo, Watermelon Bingsoo and Strawberry Bingsoo. The name references the Korean shaved-ice dessert, while the product itself is a glossy treatment balm rather than something edible.
I have the Fig Bingsoo Glass Balm in my own beauty stash, and the appeal is immediate. The mauve-nude shade, glossy finish and dessert-inspired name make the product feel fun before you have even considered the ingredient list.
That sensory approach is important. Beauty has always sold aspiration, but food-inspired products add another layer: familiarity. We already understand what peach, watermelon, honey or fig are supposed to evoke. Sweetness. Freshness. Ripeness. Comfort.
A cream described only by its technical ingredients has to explain itself. A watermelon or banana product has already created an image in your head.
Glow Recipe currently also lists a limited-edition Banana Soufflé Moisture Cream, reinforcing the brand’s tendency to combine recognizable fruits with food-like textures and names.
Black tea gets the luxury treatment
Fresh has built an entire prestige skincare collection around black tea.
Its Black Tea Age Renewal Cream, listed at $128 CAD for 50 mL, uses Mauritius black tea extract alongside squalane and ceramides. Fresh says the tea is grown at the Bois Cheri Farm in Mauritius and undergoes a multi-step extraction process before being incorporated into the formulation.
That origin story is much closer to the way we talk about wine, coffee or chocolate than conventional beauty. Where was the ingredient grown? What makes the place distinctive? How is it harvested? How is it processed?
Fresh positions black tea as central to the collection. Its comparisons with retinol are based on laboratory testing of specific biomarkers rather than proof that the moisturizer itself performs like a prescription retinoid, an important distinction when reading beauty claims.
A familiar food ingredient may be intriguing, but seeing the word tea, grape or rice on a jar tells us very little by itself about how the finished formula will perform.
Rice moves from the bowl to the beauty cabinet
Tatcha takes another pantry staple in a completely different direction.
Its bestselling The Dewy Skin Cream includes Japanese purple rice alongside hyaluronic acid, red algae and squalane. The purple rice is part of the story, but importantly, it is not acting alone.
That is where the food-beauty trend becomes more interesting than simply spotting edible ingredients on labels.
Modern skincare formulations are complex. Rice, tea or fruit extracts may sit alongside humectants, emollients, peptides, niacinamide and other established cosmetic ingredients.
In other words, we are not putting breakfast on our faces. We are using sophisticated cosmetic formulations in which a food-derived botanical happens to play one part.
From Bordeaux vineyard to bathroom shelf
Few beauty brands make the food-and-drink connection as naturally as Caudalie.
Founded in Bordeaux, the French company has built its identity around grapes and vine-derived ingredients. Its current Premier Cru Serum contains grape-derived ingredients alongside niacinamide and hyaluronic acid.
For anyone interested in wine, this is an especially compelling crossover.
Wine writers spend enormous amounts of time discussing what happens to a grape from vineyard to bottle. Beauty brands such as Caudalie ask a different question: what else can be extracted from the vine?
The company has worked with grape-derived ingredients since the 1990s and has built much of its skincare identity around the vineyard. It is a reminder that the intersection between food and beauty is not necessarily about novelty. Agriculture produces an enormous range of plant compounds and by-products, and cosmetics companies have long investigated ways of incorporating them into formulations.
Prickly pear, eggplant and the ingredient list as menu
Even some products that do not advertise themselves primarily through food are full of culinary references.
The Biossance Squalane + Copper Peptide Rapid Plumping Serum, which recently arrived for another Good Life Vancouver beauty feature, has been pitched alongside botanical extracts including passion fruit and eggplant.
Glow Recipe’s newer skincare also uses prickly pear in products built around peptides and PDRN.
These products highlight another shift. Fruit is no longer necessarily the star ingredient shouted across the front of the package. Increasingly, familiar botanicals sit beside biotechnology-heavy ingredients such as peptides, ectoin and PDRN.
The beauty industry is blending two vocabularies at once: one reassuringly natural and culinary, the other highly technical and scientific. Prickly pear and peptides is almost a perfect example. One half sounds like a cocktail menu. The other sounds like a chemistry lab.
Glow Recipe’s newer skincare also uses prickly pear in products built around peptides and PDRN.
Pickles, puns, and the peak of the trend
Just when you thought the food-to-vanity pipeline had reached its limit with fruit and tea, e.l.f. Cosmetics proved the trend can go entirely off the rails, in the best way possible.
Their limited-edition Glow Reviver Melting Lip Balm recently returned in a shade called “The Real Dill.” Yes, it’s a sheer green, dill pickle-flavored lip balm. The brand fully commits to the bit, describing the $12 CAD gloss as “dill-icious” and offering a matching pickle-shaped “Briny Blender” makeup sponge.
But the genius of the launch is what’s actually inside the tube. If you look past the novelty flavor, the formula isn’t made of fermented cucumbers. It is a highly effective, serious cosmetic base built on mango butter, cocoa butter, shea butter, and a hyaluronic acid blend. It perfectly encapsulates the modern beauty marketing strategy: taking a sophisticated, lab-perfected hydrating formula and giving it a hyper-specific, wildly unexpected food persona.
Why food works so well in beauty
There is a practical marketing reason this trend keeps returning. Food gives beauty products an instant sensory vocabulary.
Fig suggests richness. Watermelon suggests freshness and hydration. Honey suggests nourishment. Tea suggests ritual. Rice suggests simplicity and tradition. Grapes bring associations with vineyards and European luxury. And a pickle, apparently, brings in the novelty crowd.
None of those associations proves what a cosmetic product will actually do. But they make complicated formulations easier to communicate. They also make beauty more fun.
There is something far more evocative about opening a product called Fig Bingsoo than Serum Number 17.
The ingredient is only the beginning
That may be the most useful way to approach food-inspired beauty.
Enjoy the storytelling. Appreciate the textures, packaging and unusual ingredients. Learn where a botanical comes from. But do not assume a product works simply because you recognize something on its label.
The performance of skincare depends on the entire formulation, including the form and concentration of ingredients, how they are stabilized and how they interact.
A grape in a serum is not the same thing as drinking a glass of wine. Black tea extract is not the same thing as putting a tea bag on your face. And an expensive tea moisturizer is not automatically superior to a less expensive cream because its ingredient story sounds more romantic.
But from fig and watermelon to tea, rice and grapes, the crossover between the kitchen and beauty counter is producing some of the most visually appealing and creatively marketed products in the category.
And for someone who spends a lot of time thinking about food and wine, that makes this one beauty trend particularly hard to resist.
Disclosure: Some products mentioned in this article were provided for editorial consideration. Products not personally tested are included as examples of the broader trend. All opinions and editorial decisions are our own.
