The first time Clue co-founder Caleb Vanden Boom realized that butter yellow had taken over the zeitgeist was when Timothée Chalamet showed up to the 2025 Oscars red carpet in March wearing a pastel yellow suit by Givenchy. By then, Clue was already months into the creation of what would become its best-selling scent: Dandelion Butter, which arrived just in time to capture the demand for all things buttery.
“We announced [Dandelion Butter] with a billboard that said, ‘Do you like butter?’ It’s slightly unexpected or provocative to say something like that for perfume,” said Vanden Boom. “And for months, we couldn’t keep it on our site for more than a day. It was just selling out like crazy.”
The brand’s co-founders, Vanden Boom and Laura Oberwetter, conceived of the scent back in September 2024 after a road trip through Wisconsin, taking inspiration from folklore around dandelions. By Dandelion Butter’s release in June, butter yellow had reached the mainstream and become 2025’s defining color.
“Yellows have been increasingly appreciated for their optimism and nature-driven qualities that evoke pollen and sunshine, and this appreciation grew significantly since the pandemic,” said Lisa White, director of strategic forecasting at trend forecasters WGSN.
Butter yellow offered a mix of sunny optimism and ironic humor in a surprisingly wearable shade. In fashion, the hue appeared across Spring/Summer 2025 collections from the likes of Alaïa and Toteme. Sabrina Carpenter donned a pale yellow bodysuit for portions of her Short N’ Sweet Tour throughout 2025. And, according to WGSN, global searches for “butter yellow” grew 324% year-over-year between February and May 2025.
“There’s almost something subversive about championing a fattening dairy product,” said Oberwetter.
In beauty, shades of soft yellow spread to all kinds of foodstuffs by the summer. Prada released a banana yellow lip balm in July, inspired by the iconic banana motif in the Prada Spring/Summer 2011 collection. Rhode released a “lemontini” yellow lip balm that same month, with a matching sunny yellow phone case and makeup pouch. And Glossier collaborated with Magnolia Bakery on a banana pudding scent of its Balm Dot Com. For the fall, Eadem launched a butter croissant-themed lip gloss.
“I was walking around with a slogan saying, ‘Vanilla is over. Banana is taking the stage.’ I was so tired of the typical gourmand fragrances using the same ingredients over and over again, so I thought, ‘It’s time for banana to shine,’” said Romy Kowalewski, founder of Barcelona-based niche perfume brand 27 87. In February, the brand debuted its banana-inspired Hakuna Matata scent at Milan’s Exsence perfume trade show.
Food has proven to be fragrance’s most defining trend of recent years, but the gourmand trend has evolved beyond simple vanillas and into foodstuffs from across the kitchen pantry. Most recently, Sabrina Carpenter’s fragrance brand released Lemon Pie, a candied lemon and milky scent encased in a soft yellow bottle.
“It’s easier to make people understand what perfume is about if you combine it with something they can understand, which is food,” said Kowalewski of the gourmand category’s popularity.
“People do grow tired of the sexiness and the rarity and the scarcity of expensive florals,” said Oberwetter. “And they may become less excited by conversations about like, ‘Where is this tuberose sourced from?’ And maybe there’s a stronger connection with something they have in their pantry. It hits closer to home.”
For the release party for Dandelion Butter, Clue leaned into the scent’s edible side with limited-edition packaging that included an outer paper designed to make the box look like a stick of butter. Vanden Boom likened the excitement around butter to an extension of the ongoing cravings for all things milk.
“There was such a negative association with dairy for many years, with nut milk and oat milk [being trendy]. And people were kind of merging away from rich, fatty dairy,” said Vanden Boom. “We never abandoned it because we’re from Wisconsin, but you see this, kind of, full-circle moment, in terms of the food space, where people aren’t shying away from those rich dairy [products].”
The craving for all things butter has gone beyond fashion and beauty and into electronics — in August, Bose released a butter-yellow speaker, with the rectangular-box packaging that was seeded to media designed to resemble a stick of butter.
And the trend even worked its way back into food. In August, Dominique Ansel, creator of the cronut, added vanilla soft serve dipped in melted salted butter to the menu at his Papa d’Amour bakery in New York City. Though initially promoted as a limited-edition item, the cone’s popularity led the bakery to promise to keep it on the menu through the end of 2025.
But buttery or otherwise, yellow’s popularity may not be coming to an end with the conclusion of 2025. WGSN has forecast yellow to be among the “gelato pastel” shades we’ll see more of in 2026, with soft yellow tones like “quiet yellow” and “healing yellow” among shades to watch. In November, Jacquemus and Nike released their collaborative ski capsule, which includes head-to-toe pale yellow ski suits — not a far cry from Timothée Chalamet’s yellow Oscars suit eight months prior.
