5 Growing Niche Lip Treatment Flavours

Flavour Innovation: The New Frontier in Lip Care

In the fast-evolving lip care landscape, flavour has become one of the strongest vehicles for differentiation. Once limited to predictable fruit and mint varieties, lip treatments are now exploring hyper-specific, sensorially immersive flavours inspired by desserts, beverages, and café culture.

The Lip Treatment Market Overview Report 2025 tracks this transformation in depth, analysing 43 product lines across 40 brands and over 300 SKUs to uncover how flavour innovation shapes product storytelling, positioning, and consumer appeal. Beyond dominant favourites like Vanilla and Strawberry, a new wave of niche and highly stylized flavours has emerged—spanning donut shop nostalgia, tea culture, and dessert indulgence.

This article spotlights five growing niche flavour directions—Matcha, Donut, Peach, Chocolate, and Beverages—that have gained notable traction across both prestige and mass markets. Together, they signal where the next phase of lip care flavour development is heading.

Matcha: Wellness Meets Café Culture

Matcha has emerged as one of lip care’s most distinctive niche flavours, bridging wellness culture, café aesthetics, and sensorial storytelling. While still relatively new compared to more established notes like vanilla or coconut, matcha’s rise reflects a broader consumer shift toward flavours that signal mindfulness and modern ritual.

Everybody London has leaned into this theme more decisively than any other brand, creating an entire Matcha Collection within its Peptide Lip Balm range. The lineup includes Matcha Latte, Caramel Matcha, Lavender Matcha, and Raspberry Matcha, expanding the flavour beyond the traditional green tea profile into a playful, customizable series. This mirrors how matcha has evolved in beverage culture—from a ceremonial drink to a versatile flavour base adapted to countless variations.

Meanwhile, Laneige’s Matcha Bubble Tea Lip Glowy Balm brings a K-beauty interpretation, infusing matcha with a youthful, pastel sensibility and tapping into the global popularity of bubble tea aesthetics. Both brands demonstrate how matcha functions not only as a flavour, but as a symbol of balance, health, and modern lifestyle aspiration.

As consumers increasingly associate their beauty routines with self-care rituals, matcha’s blend of wellness credibility and aesthetic appeal positions it as a flavour with strong long-term potential. What was once a novelty is now becoming a recurring motif in new launches—a signal that matcha is moving from niche to mainstream in lip care.

Donut: The Rise of Glazed Indulgence

Donut-inspired flavours are rapidly emerging as a symbol of playful indulgence and sensorial luxury within the lip treatment category. Once reserved for novelty collections, this flavour direction has gained legitimacy through its alignment with the “glazed” aesthetic trend—bridging edible nostalgia, high-shine finishes, and self-care pleasure.

The strongest expression of this concept comes from Laneige, whose Glaze Craze Tinted Lip Serum collection is fully donut themed—from the flavour names to the donut-shaped silicone applicator. Shades such as Sugar Glaze, Maple Glaze, Blueberry Jelly, Chocolate Frosting, Cinnamon Sugar, Raspberry Jam, Peach Glaze, and Strawberry Sprinkles extend the metaphor beyond flavour into texture and presentation. Each variant channels the multisensory appeal of a glazed donut—rich, glossy, and instantly gratifying.

Similarly, Lanolips’ Glazed Donut 101 Ointment Multi-Balm reinforces the connection between shine and comfort, positioning glossiness itself as a form of indulgence. These launches tie directly into a wider “lip gloss revival,” where the finish and feel of a product become just as central to its storytelling as the flavour.

What makes donut flavours notable is their cultural and aesthetic duality—simultaneously nostalgic and trend-forward. They reference familiar sweetness but reframe it through contemporary beauty language, emphasizing gloss, glow, and texture. As lip care continues to merge with colour cosmetics, donut-inspired products exemplify how flavour, finish, and design can merge into a single cohesive identity.

Peach: The Soft Sensuality of Fruit-Inspired Care

Few flavours have surged in popularity as quickly as peach. Once an occasional fruit note, peach has now become a core flavour direction across both prestige and mass segments, combining the approachability of a fruit profile with the aesthetic and emotional language of softness, sensuality, and warmth.

In 2024–2025, multiple brands introduced new peach-flavoured lip treatments, marking a clear acceleration of the trend. Laneige expanded the theme through both Lip Glowy Balm – Peach Iced Tea and Glaze Craze Tinted Lip Serum – Peach Glaze, translating the flavour into two different sensorial contexts: refreshing hydration and glossy indulgence. OleHenriksen’s Peach Glaze Pout Preserve Peptide Lip Treatment and Charlotte Tilbury’s Unreal Lips Healthy Glow Nectar Oil – Juicylicious Pure Peach push the profile further toward radiant, skincare-luxury positioning.

Meanwhile, brands like Naturium (Phyto-Glow Lip Balm Peach), Lanolips (101 Ointment Multi-Balm Peach), and Revolution (Juicy Peptide Lip Balm Peach Bellini Orange) showcase peach’s adaptability—spanning clinical, heritage, and playful aesthetics alike. Even smaller and emerging players such as Everybody London and Beauty Creations have embraced peach as a key flavour narrative, reinforcing its mass-market traction.

The recent rise of peach reflects its emotional resonance—inviting, nostalgic, and subtly sensual. Visually, it aligns with the broader “soft warmth” trend dominating beauty, tying into peach-toned packaging, blush aesthetics, and the visual language of comfort. As a result, peach now functions as a cross-category connector, linking skincare’s gentle credibility with makeup’s emotive appeal—solidifying its role as one of the defining lip care flavours of 2025.

Chocolate: Comfort, Indulgence, and Seasonal Warmth

Chocolate has reemerged as one of the most emotionally resonant flavour directions in lip care—bridging comfort, indulgence, and nostalgia. Once treated as a novelty, chocolate-inspired products now deliver remarkable precision in both scent and positioning, evolving into sophisticated expressions of warmth and self-care.

Having personally tried both Summer Fridays’ Lip Butter Balm Hot Cocoa and Laneige’s Glaze Craze Tinted Lip Serum Chocolate Frosting, what stands out most is their specificity. These aren’t generic “chocolate” scents—Hot Cocoa truly captures the smell of freshly made hot chocolate, while Chocolate Frosting smells unmistakably like a chocolate frosted donut. This heightened realism marks a shift in how brands are using gourmand storytelling: not as abstract sweetness, but as immersive, sensory branding.

Across the category, brands use chocolate to evoke distinct emotional tones. OleHenriksen’s Cocoa Crème Pout Preserve Peptide Lip Treatment and Crickle Daisy’s Chocolate Cupcake Lip Treat Balm emphasize cozy indulgence, while The Beauty Crop’s Tiramisu Peptide Calm Lip Treatment and Marin’s Campfire S’mores Lip Treatment layer the scent with nuanced dessert or toasted notes.

This new wave of chocolate-flavoured lip treatments illustrates the next phase of flavour storytelling—where brands go beyond broad categories like “sweet” or “warm” and instead draw on hyper-specific, culturally loaded references that tap into memory, seasonality, and pleasure. Chocolate, in all its variations, embodies the comforting, emotionally intelligent side of modern lip care branding.

Beverages: From Coffee Culture to Bubble Tea Aesthetics

Beverage-inspired flavours have become one of the most intriguing emerging directions within lip care, mirroring the wider cultural obsession with café culture and sensorial rituals. What began as novelty has evolved into a full-fledged microtrend—where drinks like coffee, tea, and cocoa become vehicles for lifestyle storytelling.

Recent launches show how brands are leveraging beverage cues to create flavour narratives that feel comforting, indulgent, and social-media ready. Summer Fridays now offers both Hot Cocoa and Iced Coffee variants of its Lip Butter Balm, bridging cozy winter warmth and refreshing summer energy. Glossier’s Espresso Balm Dotcom taps into the cultural shorthand of caffeine as a lifestyle essential, positioning the flavour as both energizing and sophisticated.

Australian brand MCoBeauty takes a similar route with its Peptide Lip Treatment Latte, while Inde Wild explores the ritual side of beverages through Masala Chai and Caffeine Addict, aligning with its Ayurvedic-meets-modern aesthetic.

Meanwhile, Laneige brings a more playful and youth-driven spin, expanding its Lip Glowy Balm lineup with Peach Iced Tea, Taro Bubble Tea, and Matcha Bubble Tea. These flavours tie lip care directly to drink-inspired indulgence and K-beauty’s pastel sensorial world—making beverages a strong fit for the category’s “treat yourself” positioning.

The appeal lies in familiarity and fantasy: consumers already have emotional connections to these drinks, and brands can repackage that comfort and ritual into a beauty context. Whether presented as warm, spiced, or iced, beverage-inspired flavours are rapidly growing—bridging wellness culture, self-care, and social media aesthetics in one flavour profile.

From Flavour to Identity: The Evolution of Lip Care Storytelling

As lip treatments evolve from basic care into lifestyle-driven beauty objects, flavour has become a core storytelling tool—a way for brands to communicate emotion, culture, and identity. From Matcha’s wellness-coded sophistication to Chocolate’s nostalgic realism, these emerging flavour directions reflect a market that increasingly values specificity, sensory richness, and cultural resonance over generic sweetness.

While these five flavour movements represent some of the most dynamic growth areas in lip care, they’re just one layer of the full picture. The Lip Treatment Market Overview Report 2025 provides the complete context—linking flavour trends to shade strategy, ingredient positioning, packaging design, pricing structure, and retail distribution across 43 product lines.

For brand leaders, formulators, and marketers looking to differentiate or enter the lip treatment category, understanding how flavour operates as both product feature and emotional connector is essential. In a category where every detail carries narrative weight, flavour has become one of beauty’s most powerful tools for storytelling.