Jelly: An Emerging Beauty Category

Jelly is showing up across all categories, including blush, highlighter, lip color, complexion, and skincare-adjacent formulas. Brands like Violette_FR, Colour Pop and Makeup by Mario are experimenting with jelly products in cooling sticks, translucent pigments, and bouncy gel textures.

The timing makes sense - jelly formulas are the perfect lightweight texture for summer. These formulas offer color, shine, and a satisfying application experience while delivering those sheer, buildable finishes.

They also allow for easy experimentation. Swipe them on, blend them out, layer them up. There's very little intimidation factor, which makes the format particularly suited to a consumer discovering a product through a creator and immediately thinking, I could do that.

Texture As A Social Hook

Jelly texture has become part of the entertainment on social. Watch creators like Mireya Rios or Ellie Purvis use a jelly product and the appeal is almost immediate. There's the bounce of the formula. The first swipe. The pigment hitting the skin. The blend. The payoff. Creator Hannah Fosbenner even created a full face of exclusively jelly makeup.

Jelly formulas give creators a natural visual hook and lend themselves to the content formats beauty audiences already love: swatches, close-up application, first impressions, before-and-afters, and satisfying texture shots.

From Scroll to Sale

In a feed crowded with product recommendations, that instant visual payoff matters. The product doesn’t need an elaborate concept or lengthy explanation to capture attention because the application itself becomes the story. And because the viewer can immediately see how the product behaves and performs, the content can move quickly from entertainment to consideration to sale.

TikTok Shop is already successfully selling jelly-format products from brands including NYX, e.l.f., Milk Makeup, and Revolution Beauty, creating a remarkably short path from seeing the texture in action to buying it.

The Takeaway

An interesting question for beauty marketers is: How does your product show up on camera? For years, product development and content strategy largely existed as separate conversations. Today, social commerce is bringing them much closer together.

Texture, packaging, application, transformation, and payoff all create opportunities for storytelling. The more naturally a product gives creators something interesting to demonstrate, the less work the content has to do to manufacture a hook.

In a social-first beauty landscape, how a product performs on camera is becoming almost as important as how it performs in real life.