Jellycore in 2025: Why Texture, Colour, and Nostalgia Are Shaping the Year’s Most Sensory Trend
- Maheshwari Raj
- Jul 11
- 4 min read
From Tokyo cafés to Paris runways, jelly’s quiet shimmer has become a tactile manifesto — a love letter to softness and spectacle.
Where Jelly Core Wobble Begins
On a rainy afternoon in Omotesando, Tokyo, you’re handed a tall glass of soda layered with translucent cubes that glow like captured light. Beside you, a woman dabs her cheeks with a blush that sinks softly into her skin, leaving a glassy flush. Across the world, in London, a shimmering tower of gelatin is revealed at the centre of a dining table, its surface catching the candlelight as diners fall momentarily silent, enchanted by its delicate quiver.
This is jellycore, a mood that has slipped beyond childhood confections into beauty, design, and dining. Playful yet deliberate, nostalgic yet avant‑garde, it is not just a texture but a language of tenderness.
The Emotional Logic of Jelly Core
While much of the coverage in Allure, Byrdie, The Guardian has rightly celebrated jelly blushes and plated desserts, what they’ve missed is the unifying thread: jelly as emotional design.
In a world of frictionless screens and synthetic gloss, jelly offers something to feel, it trembles in the hand, glistens on the cheek, lingers on the tongue. It is the physical embodiment of a cultural desire to touch beauty, not just scroll past it. Its aesthetic siblings glazed skin in beauty, glassware in interiors, spherified textures in modernist cuisine also reflect this move toward tactility.
As Eater observes:
“We’re watching jelly evolve from nostalgia into artistry — a wobbly medium treated as glass, as sculpture, as experience.”
And beyond Western eyes, jelly has long lived in Japanese wagashi craft and Korean dessert cafés traditions that celebrate seasonality and translucence with quiet reverence.
Where to Find Jellycore
Between these disciplines lies a single thread, a shimmer you can taste, touch, and wear.
Where Drinks Glitter
At Tokyo’s JELLY JELLY CAFE, a beloved board game café chain, you can sip an iced latte jelly with soy milk between rounds of Carcassonne. Elsewhere in Tokyo, wagashi‑inspired cafés serve parfaits and pastel agar cubes layered into matcha drinks — delicate, seasonal spectacles.
In Seoul, cafés like LEEDORIM Coffee & Vegan Bakery offer matcha latte with Sulhyang Strawberry, while Café Coin and others in Hongdae layer desserts with sweet jelly and red bean teas. Notice how each sip is less about thirst and more about choreography light, texture, sound in a glass.
Where Gloss Meets Skin
The tactile pleasure of jelly in beauty is undeniable: Fwee's Glowy Jelly Pot, Milk Makeup's Jelly Tint, Rom&nd's glosses, all bouncy, sheer, and cool to the touch.
Byrdie writes:
“Squishy, sheer, kinda‑cooling cheek tints… juicy, playful, and very much on our radar.”
Even Lush, known for their indulgent textures, has extended jelly into wellness with their Jelly Shower Gels. A wobbly cleanser that shimmers, squeezes, and lathers into delight.
Where Plates Shimmer
In fine dining, jelly has evolved from kitsch to sculpture. At London’s Adventures in Jelly, diners watch prisms and towers of gelatin unveiled like jewellery desserts that sway with the grace of glass.
Sam Bompas, co‑founder of Bompas & Parr,a London studio has pioneered jelly banquets as edible art in the late 2000s explains:
“It’s emotional, the wobble, the translucence, the absurdity — it brings people joy and reminds them of what eating can feel like.”
And the revival extends to home kitchens too. Domino recently showcased a series of jelly cakes molded, jewel‑toned creations styled like mid‑century objets d’art proving that jelly’s retro‑modern allure now graces even the domestic table.
When these creations appear whether on a tasting menu or a vintage cake stand — guests lean in, cameras flash, laughter bubbles. Proof that design can be both sophisticated and silly, and still unforgettable.
Why Tastemakers Should Care
To notice jellycore is to acknowledge a shift in sensibility, an embrace of softness, craftsmanship, and emotional tactility. It rewards those attuned to how beauty hides in ordinary things, a drink, a blush, a dessert waiting to glisten in the right light.
As The Guardian notes:
“Jelly evokes birthday parties, but today it also evokes craftsmanship — something painstakingly shaped and gleaming, ready to be shared.”
What the Wobble Teaches Us
Jellycore asks us to savour design through our senses to let texture be a form of narrative, and colour a kind of memory. It reminds us that sometimes what wobbles is not fragile but alive with meaning. Next time you see it in a glass, on your cheek, under a candle’s glow pause. Jellycore is more than nostalgia. It’s an invitation: to touch what you’re tempted to only look at, to feel what you forgot was yours to feel.
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