In April, fragrance brand Ellis Brooklyn launched Guava Granita, a tropical gourmand scent packaged in an enticing pink bottle. It was another in a line of fruity-inspired scents from the brand. “Our Guava Granita is like a sister to our pink pineapple scent, Miami Nectar,” said Ellis Brooklyn founder Bee Shapiro. “We wanted to capture the season but in a chic, ‘White Lotus’ kind of way.”
And it just so happened to speak to the precise food trend of the moment. Eadem’s Guava Fresca lip balm sold out when it launched at Sephora in May. Summer Fridays also had guava on the mind when it launched a pink guava take on its popular lip balm in June. And Tarte joined in on the fun that same month with a guava-themed collab with Dunkin. It’s no surprise influencers and editors have deemed this season to be “Guava Girl Summer.”
The concept of Guava Girl Summer is far from new, however. It’s another trendy fruit in a long line of food-related beauty microtrends, like glazed doughnut skin, Strawberry Girl makeup, the blueberry milk manicure and Tomato Girl Summer.
Those trends are appealing as a catchy way to repackage classic seasonal colors, like coral pink as “guava.” But they also speak to consumers looking to communicate a lifestyle via their fashion and beauty choices: Staud’s $295 beaded sardine bag may be a more accessible conduit to having a “Sardine Girl Summer,” another trending foodstuff, than an actual trip to Sardinia.
“People really use aesthetics to align themselves with the lifestyle they either have or want to have,” said Addison Cain, marketing and insights lead at consumer trends agency Spate. “It’s an easy way to participate in a lifestyle, regardless of whether you actually live that lifestyle or you are just aspiring.”
And rather than leaving consumers fatigued by the endless rise and fall of edible trends, food’s adaptability has left beauty audiences constantly hungry for more. Spate data found a 1,000% year-over-year growth in fragrance-related “guava” searches and a 76% rise in skin care searches featuring “guava.”
“We keep seeing new [food] iterations because they’re really emotionally evocative. And then they have that visual, sensorial element,” said Emily Larsen, associate strategy director at social media strategy agency Movers+Shakers. “They’re very shareable. They give people that playful way to express their identity.”
Larsen named Hailey Bieber’s Rhode as a “North Star” in creating desirability through food-based marketing: The brand worked with Krispy Kreme to create a strawberry glazed doughnut to promote its strawberry glaze lip treatment in 2023 and has often used foods like croissants and espresso martinis to promote its products.
For Autumne West, national beauty director at Nordstrom, beauty food microtrends have been a mainstay in the social media era in part because of their sense of escapism: Coral pink is simply a color, but guava, with its association with tropical locales, conjures up an entire vibe. And better yet, food is almost universally appealing.
“It’s snackable, it’s fast, it’s easy. It’s something that’s going to get you to click,” said West. “Food is simply relatable. It makes the [beauty] category relatable to everybody.”
And some trending beauty foodstuffs do correlate to trends in actual food. Spate’s 2025 Food & Beverage Trends report found that guava’s popularity as a snack flavor rose 766.2% year over year, based on Google searches and TikTok views. Brands are working with content creators to make those connections to food more explicit: Larsen cited Movers + Shakers’s campaign with E.l.f., for which the brand partnered with TikTok chefs like Cassie Yeung on recipes inspired by its Reviver Melting Lip Balm launch.
“Looking at some of the top videos for the recent resurgence of Tomato Girl Summer, I’m seeing a lot of at-home cooking content,” said Cain. “When we saw it the first time, we were seeing a lot of makeup and clothing and aesthetic type things. But actually, I’m seeing a lot of really artisanal-looking sandwiches or burrata and tomato salad and a lot of heirloom tomato content.”
Even beyond food, Cain noted that TikTok has created a whole host of micro-aesthetics as users seek to categorize styles into discrete labels like “mob wife” and “coastal grandma.” Participating in trends like “Guava Girl Summer” or “Sardine Girl Summer” is just another way to find a place of belonging.
“I think a lot of it has to do with the communities that build up around these aesthetics,” said Cain. “It’s about community and people finding their aesthetic, and they need to know what to call it in order to successfully find it and achieve it.”
