Has this ever happened to you? You’re minding your own business, when suddenly an ad for food pops up. A perfectly stacked burger with nary a sesame seed out of place…fries the color of the sun at summertime…a milkshake so impossibly frothy you don’t know whether to sip it or slather it on your body…you had only eaten lunch an hour ago, but now, as if by magic, you’re starving again.
Of course, when you finally do make it through the fast food window, your order looks nothing like that dreamy photograph. Many of us know that this expectation-vs-reality moment is because an entire team of creatives work together to create the image that sold you the idea of the food.
In other words, it’s an art form. And if there’s any doubt of that, just watch a food stylist at work.
Food stylist and recipe developer Diana Jeffra has wowed over 18 million people on TikTok with her video of what appears to be delicious cookies n’ cream ice cream, which actually contains no ice cream at all.
In the video, Jeffra explains that the faux ice cream was created to appear in the background of a photo for an ice cream sandwich company. Which in turn meant that the product would have it last a couple of hours without melting.
Though she does use non-food products on occasion to get the look she wants, Jeffra tries to stick to the real deal. So for this recipe, she whips together a combination of frosting and powdered sugar, adding in additional scoops of the latter ingredient until she reaches her desired texture, after which she kneads in Oreo bits.
And voila, smooth, mouthwatering “ice cream.” And it’s still edible, so win win!
She also mentioned that since food stylist can be a hard business to break into, she wanted to give others some helpful tips on the creative side, hence her behind-the-scenes videos which on more than one occasion have been called “fascinating” by viewers.
Take this video for instance, which has 445,000 views, where Jeffra shows how to create perfectly photogenic eggs.
Or this one of a milkshake, which has nearly 2 million views.
“I know it looks delicious, but trust me, it’s not,” she says, revealing that what you see is actually a cup of mashed potatoes in a very glamorous disguise.
Or how about this: ever wondered how they get non-melting ice for fancy drinks? Sure, you can order some pretty uniform ones, but in this video, Jeffra shows how she makes them herself:
Even this simple trick for how to get a perfectly unwrapped candy bar is so so cool:
