The milkshake lens was made on a whim late one night. Thanks to this commercial, the song "Milkshake" by Kelis was (and probably still is to this day) stuck in my head.
I first did a search for milkshake lenses to make sure I wasn't copying someone else's work. I then started looking up milkshape gifs using the Giphy importer in Lens Studio. I found one I liked and put it on the person's eyes. I also experimented with putting a big milkshake gif in the background, but I wasn't liking the way that looked. Next I looked up lip gifs. I was thinking of using a "licking lips" gif, but those were all overly sexual for this particular lens. I ended up just using the weird mouth gif that is in the final lens.
Now that the face was complete, I moved on to spicing things up. I got a sprinkle background from Pixabay and used segmentation to put it in the background. Things were still seeming a little plain, so I looked through a few of the color correction post effects and fell in love with the blue and pink "Miami" one.
When I finish a lens, I sometimes post it to the r/SnapLenses subreddit, but not always. The milkshake lens was one of those that I did not share on Reddit. All I did was post it on my Snapchat story, make a short Tiktok video to the song "Milkshake," and my wife shared it on her Instagram. With an abysmal Tiktok following, small number of Snapchat friends, and my wife's private Instagram account, I did not expect this lens to go too far. But I was wrong. I guess the right person somewhere saw this lens because it blew up in popularity literally overnight.
It is interesting to me to see which of my lenses become popular and which don't. So far popularity on r/SnapLenses is an extremely poor predictor of a lens' success. My alien twerk lens was not very popular on Reddit while the alien run lens was. However, the alien twerk lens has way more views than the alien run lens. My other top lenses, the milky way and milkshake, were not shared on Reddit but became popular.
You can find the lens here.