About

Adult Cake Smashing is a photo trend in which adult participants dress as toddlers and eat cake with their hands and purposely making a mess to ironically celebrating their birthdays, typically their 30th. The trend is a parody of baby cake smashing photos, which people do for their children on their first birthdays.

Origin

The earliest known example of the trend was posted in September 2013 by the photography website casophotography.com,^[1] who added two photos of an adult cake smash to a gallery of infant cake smash photos (shown below).

Spread

On June 30, 2014, the photo company Atkins Photography^[3] posted a series of photos of Cake Smash that was staged as an advertisement (shown below). They wrote, "I put an ad on Facebook for a volunteer to do an adult cake smash and she did great!!! The day we did the 'smash' was her actual 29th Birthday!"

On March 5th, 2015, the trend began appearing on Instagram under the hashtag "#adultcakesmash." That day, Instgram^[4] user @ asjr_photos_gaming posted an image of a man's 21st birthday (shown below, left).

It was around this time that participants began dressing up as infants as well. Later that year, on October 2nd, Facebook ^[6] user shannonsquiresphoto posted a series of photos of a woman imitating an infant participating. The post received more than 2,000 reactions, 150 comments and 45 shares (shown below, center).
On October 22nd, 2015, Instagram^[5] user @sweetsisterchicsister posted an image of a man wearing a diaper and participating in a cake smash. The post received more than 170 likes in four years (shown below, right).

Several media outlets have reported on the trend, as well. On March 1st, 2018, Delish^[7] published a report on the cake smashes. On June 9th, 2019, the Washington Post^[2] covered the trend, pushing it further into the mainstream. They wrote:

Like adult coloring books and Donald Trump’s candidacy: How did we get here? Baby cake smashes have been a trend for a few years now. Initially, they were an informal thing that happened at baby’s first birthday -- give Junior his first taste of cake and snap away as he makes funny faces! -- until some photographer somewhere realized they could be staged and monetized. And that’s how the baby cake smash became another stop on the march of occasions that might merit professional images, after the gender-reveal photoshoot and the newborn photoshoot, but before the mommy-and-me shoot and the Christmas cards and the vacation photoshoot and the senior pictures.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References