Along with the fact that smashing cake on someone's face is wasteful and can potentially hurt someone, it is also disrespectful to the bakers who made it.
There are a lot of fun customs around the world. For instance, there's something called "jump the baby" in Spain, wherein men dress up as devils and jump over babies. In Finland, every year a "wife-carrying championship" takes place. Similarly, the "cake smash" tradition on birthdays emerges from a Mexican tradition called Mordida, meaning "bite" in Spanish. It means that the birthday boy or girl is shoved into the cake by a friend or family member while everyone screams "Mordida!" In a recent post on Reddit, u/xuanhu shared a picture titled, "This cake has a warning to not face smash."
The picture was of a cake box from Paris Baguette in the US and it had a disclaimer on it. The warning read, "There is a clip in the middle of the cake board to keep the cake stable during transportation. Behaviors such as traditional face smashing into the cake can result in severe injury. Some of the decorations on the cake might be inedible.” This can be a scary thing to miss out on reading because it can easily result in a terrible accident. While Paris Baguette did put it on their box, a lot of other bakers also do the same.
As mentioned earlier, the birthday cake smash roots from Mexico. In fact, Salma Hayek said so during an interview with Jimmy Kimmel Live! where she spoke about how she got to celebrate that tradition with her friends when she was away from her husband and family. While many Mexicans love this tradition, so much so that it also happens at weddings these days, doesn't take away from the reality that it can be a potentially dangerous scenario to be in.
Not everyone reads what is written on a cake box. Sometimes people are just too excited to be able to eat the cake inside. Emphasizing that very emotion, u/KeepNotesThisTime said, "Hideous 'tradition,' sad that cakes need to have warnings on them because people are savage idiots." After all, even if bakers can fend off liability owing to their warning on the box, a reputation once scarred, remains scarred. According to u/___kuromi___, there should be some changes in the way it was written. They said, "Should've been written way bigger and in bold because I've seen way too many videos of people smashing their loved ones' faces onto the cake."
u/StruggleSiamese, who was presumably a baker, said, "I'd love to write on the box that it took me hours to make this cake so only an a****** would face smash on my hard work. I make cake to be eaten, not to be thrown in the trash." The writer of the post jokingly commented saying, "Cake was tasty; if anyone was wondering, we followed instructions." After all, it can now be guaranteed that the cake was definitely not smashed! All things said and done, smashing someone's face into a cake for whatever reason can never be alright since it is as inconsiderate to the baker as it is wasteful in general.