Thailand’s viral “Prung Jued” makeup trend is moving from the beauty mirror to the dining table, as the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (“ThaiHealth”) and Dentsu One Bangkok transform the cultural phenomenon into a behavioural health initiative with “The Less Seasoned Palette”.
Adding extra seasoning before eating is a deeply ingrained habit for many Thais. While the health risks associated with heavily seasoned diets are well understood, awareness has struggled to dislodge an everyday behaviour embedded in the way many Thais eat. For ThaiHealth, the goal was to provide Thais a practical way to understand what “less” actually looks like.
The idea was to turn a playful cultural contradiction into a behavioral intervention. The campaign takes its inspiration from “Prung Jued,” a viral makeup trend of making something milder or less intense and reimagines it to help habitual over-seasoners reduce the amount of extra seasoning they add to their food.
Developed by Dentsu One Bangkok as a beauty-inspired health tool, “The Less Seasoned Palette” looks every bit like a makeup palette, providing a physical reference for how much seasoning to add, if they choose to be added at all.
The first phase of the campaign engaged with select beauty KOLs who received the colourful palettes and unboxed an unexpected palette with four slots designed to hold the seasonings Thais routinely add to their food, such as sugar, chilli flakes, fish sauce and other everyday seasonings². Each of its four slots holds a maximum of ¼ teaspoon, translating an abstract instruction to “season less” into an amount people can immediately see and remember.
Supatnuj Sorndamrih, Senior Director of Social Marketing, ThaiHealth, commented, “We have been working to encourage people to reduce seasoning for many years. But what made this initiative different was the way it connected health promotion with something people were already interested in. By turning a cultural trend into a practical tool for everyday life, we were able to make healthier choices feel more relevant and easier to adopt. It showed us that when health communication moves with culture, people pay attention, people are more willing to listen, and the impact can go much further.”
Subun Khow, Chief Creative Officer, Dentsu Creative Thailand, said: “We share an ambition with ThaiHealth to find moments where an idea can have a real consequence in people’s lives. Health is serious, but the ideas we use to change it do not always have to be. That is what we love about “The Less Seasoned Palette”. It takes a subject people have heard about many times and gives them a completely unexpected reason to look at it again. It may begin with something playful, but what we hope it leaves behind is something much more enduring, and a different choice.”
In 2024, ThaiHealth and Dentsu One Bangkok also partnered to deliver “The Seasoning of Change”, which reimagined the ubiquitous Thai restaurant seasoning set in miniature to encourage people to reduce the amount they added to each meal.
“The Less Seasoned Palette” brings ThaiHealth’s “Season Less, Reduce Disease Risk” message to life by encouraging Thais to taste before seasoning, use less when they do season, or ideally avoid adding extra seasoning altogether. It reflects a broader approach to behavioural health communication to make healthier choices easier to understand and easier to begin.
