By Mila Johanna Papini. Cover image Eva Joy Adcock.
Last summer, beauty wanted to be butter. This year, it wants to be banana.
From clothes and accessories to cosmetics and even food-inspired beauty, butter yellow seemed to be everywhere in 2025. Soft, creamy and almost good enough to eat, the shade quickly became one of the year’s most recognisable trends. But what happened when summer ended? The shift may sound subtle, but it marks a bigger change in the way colour and scent move through beauty. Now banana is taking that same appetite-driven language somewhere new, from lip tints and balms to gourmand fragrances, and increasingly into compositions that have little to do with dessert.
The result is a new sensory vocabulary: banana as comfort and nostalgia, but also as a surprisingly sophisticated raw material.
How Butter Yellow Took Over Beauty in 2025
Butter yellow became one of the defining colours of 2025. In beauty, nails were among the first to embrace it: Hermès introduced its limited-edition Jaune Pollen nail polish, while Hailey Bieber’s “lemon drop” manicure helped bring yellow nails into the social-media spotlight. Soon, the trend moved beyond manicures. Rhode launched its limited-edition Lemontini Peptide Lip Tint, combining a summery yellow aesthetic with a shimmering lip product, while Prada Beauty introduced its playful Banana Yellow Balm. Even the runway joined in, with Dries Van Noten’s Spring/Summer 2025 beauty looks experimenting with buttermilk-toned eyelids. Among all these shades, one kept surfacing more than the rest: banana. Not just yellow, but a specific fruit. And, in 2026, a specific smell.
From Wearing Yellow to Smelling Banana
If 2025 was about wearing butter yellow, 2026 seems to be asking a different question: what if we could smell it? Banana has unexpectedly become one of fragrance’s most intriguing directions, transforming a playful fruit into increasingly creative olfactory interpretations. Its naturally creamy character makes it an obvious match for the gourmand world, and some fragrances fully embrace that association. Juliette Has a Gun’s Banana Rush turns the fruit into an almost tropical dessert, combining banana and maple syrup with coconut, frangipani, vanilla and sandalwood. Other creations push the edible fantasy even further, from Kayali’s Maui in a Bottle Sweet Banana 37 and Borntostandout’s Nanatopia to Lush’s Banoffee Pie.
Banana Gets Serious: Beauty’s New Fragrance Obsession
But the real evolution begins when banana moves away from dessert altogether. I first encountered Naked Bänänä, from Italian niche brand Esse Strikes The Notes, at Esxence in Milan, among dozens of new launches competing for attention. Here, banana is treated from a different perspective: paired with the freshness of grapefruit and the spice of clove, followed by magnolia and peony and eventually a woody base of vetiver, patchouli, ambroxan and sandalwood. Rather than recreating banana bread, candy or cake, the fragrance allows the fruit itself to take centre stage in a more complex composition. A similar departure from sugar comes from 2787’s Hakuna Matata, composed by the perfumer Rodrigo Flores-Roux: the fragrance sets banana against honey, with bergamot adding lift and a jasmine sourced from southern China giving the composition its heart. The result reads fruity-amber rather than dessert-like, proof that a note so tied to childhood snacks and milkshakes can still be treated like a serious ingredient.
From Sugar to Fruit: Gourmand’s Next Chapter
Banana, however, is only one sign of a much bigger shift happening in fragrance: a fresher interpretation of gourmand has been gaining attention. YSL’s Libre Berry Crush takes the iconic lavender and orange blossom signature of Libre and introduces juicy raspberry and creamy coconut, creating something that remains indulgent while feeling noticeably fruitier. Strawberry has also become difficult to ignore, appearing across beauty through launches such as Rabanne’s Valentine’s Fame In Love and Patrick Ta’s latest Strawberry Shortcake collection. Notes such as watermelon, melon and pear are also rising in popularity, suggesting that our appetite for gourmand beauty is expanding. This is exactly what makes banana so compelling. It sits naturally between these two worlds: creamy enough to suggest a sweet gourmand, yet still a fruit capable of being interpreted in a fresher and more unexpected way.
