When Alissa Sullivan and Leslie Hendin conceived of a perfume interpretation of choux à la crème for their clean perfume brand Liis, they intended to draw upon Sullivan’s French heritage. They did not know they would be hitting on one of 2024’s biggest beauty trends: a craving for all things milk.
“We had always wanted to do a gourmand,” said Sullivan. “We really loved the idea of creating a photorealistic choux à la crème.”
The resulting fragrance, Choux Choux, with notes of salted caramel, citrus peel, and fresh cream, was launched in October, which happened to be right in step with the milk zeitgeist. Clean beauty brand Ilia launched a cleansing face milk in January. Dedcool, the fragrance and laundry brand, expanded its best-selling Xtra Milk perfume to body care in July. Sephora-favorite fragrance brand Phlur released a Heavy Cream hair and body mist in August. And Glossier launched You Rêve, a buttercream-infused flanker to its classic You fragrance, in September.
Sweet and creamy in scent and texture, those milky beauty products speak to an audience craving an escape to simpler times. But milk as a beauty category is far from child’s play; the trend is expected to remain a major trend driver in 2025. At the same time, certain types of milk have become not just a beauty tool, but also a political statement.
“For Gen Z, the demand is very specifically about sweet treats and delights — cafe latté smells, yummy marshmallows and Parisian cafe delight type of things. And it’s all based on milk,” said Lisa Payne, head of beauty at trend forecaster Stylus. “Milk is very creamy, sweet and comforting. We’re not in a pandemic, but we’re faced with lots of other different types of insecurities right now: the cost-of-living crisis, Trump’s re-election, etc. There’s a lot of social need for comfort and stability.”
Payne attributes the rise in milky-textured skin care to influences from Asian formulations as well as the adoption of products that promise nourishing, barrier-strengthening benefits. Brands like Violette FR and Hailey Bieber’s Rhode helped popularize face milks for a Western audience with their Boum Boum Milk and Glazing Milk, launched in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Beauty market analysts Spate predict the demand for milky toner will grow by 58.9% in 2025.
But some wellness proponents have taken milk’s comforting simplicity to a more polarizing extreme: Raw milk emerged as a major beauty and wellness trend in 2024, with the likes of luxury health food store Erewhon and Gwyneth Paltrow endorsing its purported benefits. Some online creators have claimed that drinking raw milk can help clear skin issues like acne or eczema.
According to Nielsen IQ data, raw milk sales rose by 35% across the U.S. in June compared to the year prior. Raw milk has not undergone pasteurization, a process that uses heat to kill pathogens like E. coli and salmonella. Some states, like California, permit the sale of raw milk at the retail level while others restrict its sales to farms or ban it altogether. The FDA has disputed claims that raw milk contains more nutritional benefits than pasteurized milk and maintains that pasteurized milk is safer for consumption, particularly among children. In July, dozens of cases of salmonella were linked to raw milk from California dairy farm Raw Farm.
For Charlotte Palermino, esthetician and co-founder of skin-care brand Dieux, the rise of raw milk follows a familiar playbook in the beauty sphere.
“This is very similar to the mineral-chemical sunscreen debate,” said Palermino. “There are people online who say that mineral sunscreen is best, and so brands start making all this mineral sunscreen. But when push comes to shove, the most popular brands across the board are always chemical sunscreens because they perform better.”
Raw milk consumers remain a minority. 2022 FDA data found just 4.4% of U.S. adults consume raw milk at least once a year. But Palermino believes the growing embrace of raw milk points to a troubling pattern.
“It’s a rejection of science. It’s a rejection of intellectuality,” she said. “You usually see this on the rise whe authoritarian regimes take their hold, which is scary for America.”
Raw milk proponents have entered more mainstream channels in recent months. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, has stated he only drinks raw milk. Erewhon and “meatfluencer” Paul Saladino collaborated on a $19 smoothie made with raw milk and beef liver available at the high-end grocery store over the summer. RFK Jr. has encouraged Raw Farm CEO Mark McAfee, whose raw dairy products were recalled in December after they were found to contain bird flu, to apply for a position with the FDA.
In contrast to vegan-adjacent natural beauty movements of years past, consuming raw milk has become associated with right-wing politics. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, launched a “raw milkmaid” dress in December. The model Gabbriette, dubbed one of 2024’s “it” girls, raised eyebrows when she shared a recipe on TikTok using raw milk, with some followers questioning what her use of raw milk means about her political views.
The move toward raw milk also often comes with a distrust of institutions, Payne says.
“We see more influence online of people like Dr. Barbara O’Neill, who are actively arguing that governments and big pharma and big food and everyone is out to get us. … There is a lot of that type of narrative and that language that’s making people feel like they want to rebel against the system,” she said. “Like, ‘Let’s return to celebrating nature and an old way of living at its best, and move away from ultra-processed foods,’ a lot of which are in vegan-alternative foods.”
And raw milk isn’t the only cow product being hailed as a miracle ingredient in 2024. Influencers like Nara Smith have praised beef tallow as a moisturizer, while colostrum, the first milk that mammals produce after giving birth, has emerged in products ranging from protein powder from Ballerina Farm to — where else? — Erewhon smoothies.
Not all proponents of colostrum protein powder or beef tallow moisturizer are aiming to rebel against the system. But for many, the image of milk, whether captured in a lactonic aromachemical or interpreted as a face toner, conjures up the feeling of returning to nature — an appealing proposition in an increasingly digitized, and polarized, world.
“As our society becomes more AI, technological and crypto, it’s hard to process what the implications of all those technologies are,” said Liis co-founder Leslie Hendin. “Maybe the raw milk thing, and even maybe the lactonic notes trend, have something to do with that, going to what we know is safer.”
