Ugly and chaotic cakes are taking over Instagram as the latest iteration of young consumers’ move towards anti-perfectionism. YPulse wrote about The Cult of Ugly back in 2019, but young consumers’ interest in messy, candid content has only grown since then. While aesthetics like #chaoscore and #globinmode refer mostly to fashion, the TikTok-led, Gen Z-approved movement towards all things chaotic has been showing up in their food content preferences, too. In fact, our recent trend report, The End of Foodie Culture (As We Know It) (WE version forthcoming), shows that Gen Z wants to see food content that is fun and messy rather than perfect—and the ugly cake trend fits right into that. Led by bakers in Berlin, London, Portugal, and beyond, ugly cakes forgo perfectly smoothed frosting and Baking Show-level decorations in favor of “concrete-coloured icing” and a “muddy, moss-textured base”—in other words, all things unappetizing or, as Londen baker George McCallum put it, “a bit weird, grim or unsettling.” (The Face)
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