Breakout Social

What’s Trending on TikTok? A 2025 Guide for Brands Who Want to Move Fast

TikTok isn’t just for teens dancing in their bedrooms anymore. The platform has evolved into a global discovery engine, influencing buying habits, aesthetics, slang, and social movements across all age groups. What’s trending on TikTok today is often what people are Googling, talking about, and shopping for tomorrow.

In 2025, the nature of trends has shifted. It’s no longer about surface-level virality. Trends now span across visuals, audio, microcultures, seasonal shifts, and creator behaviours. As TikTok’s user base ages and diversifies, trend formats have matured to reflect broader interests, from nostalgic content to productivity routines, from hyper-specific fashion cores to community-led challenges.

In this guide, we break down what’s trending right now, how these formats have evolved, and, crucially, how your brand can actually use each of them to create relevant, impactful content.

 

1. Visual Trends: Carousels and Lo-Fi Nostalgia

What’s Trending

Photo-based content is on the rise, particularly lo-fi slideshows. The “Top 10 Photos from My Camera Roll” format paired with the slowed Bliss audio has gone viral as creators reflect on travel, life phases, or aesthetic snapshots.

This marks a pivot from hyper-edited video to more reflective, human-feeling content.

Reference: Guardian – Noughties nostalgia on TikTok

How to Get Stuck In

• Use the carousel feature to showcase your product journey, founder story, or customers using your product.
  • Pair with nostalgic or ambient audios like Bliss slowed to ride the current aesthetic wave.
  • Focus on grainy, raw, or film-style photo quality. Avoid polished product photography here.

Example: A skincare brand could showcase 10 moments in their product development with simple captions and no voiceover. The result feels personal and real, the format does the work.

 

2. Audio Trends: Songs as Emotional Anchors

What’s Trending

Audios that tell stories or create irony are gaining traction. Songs like Your Love Is My Drug (Kesha cover) and Holy Airball are being used not just for entertainment but for creating contrast, throwbacks, or inside jokes.

• Your Love Is My Drug: Used in friendship montages or reveal formats
  • Holy Airball: Used to mock failure or highlight redemption arcs

Reference: PiPiAds TikTok Audio Tracker

How to Get Stuck In

• Match audio with context, don’t just chase the trend. Use it to highlight a contrast or narrative.
  • Overlay simple on-screen text. Let the music and visuals carry the emotion.
  • Use trending sounds early in your video (within first 3 seconds) to boost engagement.

Example: A supplement brand could use Holy Airball to show “me trying to get 8 hours of sleep before finding magnesium gummies that actually work.”

 

3. Food and Fashion Microtrends: Culture Meets Commerce

What’s Trending

Trends like Sardine Girl Summer, Toasty Glam, and matcha-based food content are merging food, wellness, and fashion into themed mini-movements. These trends are visual, community-driven, and expressive, making them ideal for brands to tap into through alignment or aesthetic cues.

References:
• WhoWhatWear – Toasty Glam Makeup
• TOI – Foodie Calls Dating Trend

How to Get Stuck In

• Look at colours, textures, or themes within the trend, and create content that visually belongs.
  • Use relevant hashtags to anchor your video in the trend’s ecosystem.
  • Remix UGC from creators already participating in the trend using Spark Ads or collaborations.

Example: A fashion brand selling pastel loungewear could build a “Matcha Moodboard” carousel, tag #sardinegirl, and co-create a capsule with a food creator.

 

4. Community Formats: Pranks, Group Games, and Collective Fun

What’s Trending

Group videos with prank calls, guessing games, and audience reveals are booming. These formats thrive on anticipation and payoff, often using suspenseful music and on-screen text.

Think: “We prank called my best friend and told her I’m moving to Bali” or “Guess which one of us just got engaged.”

How to Get Stuck In

• Run creator campaigns using this format. Give creators a prompt that leads to your product being revealed.
  • Use on-screen countdowns, facial reactions, or storytelling, especially if the product is secondary to the payoff.
  • Repurpose reactions into testimonial content.

Example: A TikTok Shop brand could challenge creators to prank call a friend and pitch the product as a made-up invention, then reveal it’s real and available on their Shop.

 

5. Trending Hashtags by Category

Hashtags help the algorithm categorise your content and help users discover it.

Beauty:
#toastyglam #koreanskincare #skinhealth

Fashion:
#bratstyle #summerlookbook #bikinihaul

Home & Lifestyle:
#outdoorfurniture #modernhome #interiorvibes

Food & Beverage:
#easyrecipes #icedmatcha #foodtok

Sports & Culture:
#airball #strangerthings #runtok

Travel:
#cruiselife #citybreaks #palmszn

How to Get Stuck In

• Pair one or two trending hashtags with your niche-specific ones, no more than five total.
  • Combine with relevant audio to double your discoverability.
  • Monitor your views and adjust which tags work best based on engagement, not just reach.

 

Final Thought: From Trend Spotting to Trend Surfing

TikTok’s trending content is no longer about copying what you see. It’s about understanding the why behind the trend, what feeling or cultural moment it taps into, and then authentically participating in it through your brand’s lens.

The evolution of trends from dances and memes to nostalgic edits, cultural aesthetics, and subtle humour shows the platform is growing up, and so are its users. There’s room for luxury, for indie brands, for DTC product creators, and yes, even for manufacturers.

At Break-Out, we don’t just track trends, we help brands plug into them in a way that drives commerce. If you want a monthly trend tracker, tailored content briefs, or help launching your next creator campaign, we’re here to help you move faster and smarter.