Museum of Candy: Dubai’s Sweetest New Obsession

Opened recently on Umm Hurair Road, Dubai’s Museum of Candy doesn’t try to sell itself as serious. There are no glass cases or sugarcane timelines. No curator explaining the cultural relevance of gummy bears. Instead, you step into a surreal world where the main objective is simple: enjoy yourself.

More than 15 themed rooms unfold in sequence, each one louder and more absurd than the last. There’s a sprinkle pool you can actually jump into, oversized sweets you can sit on, a tunnel lit with colour-shifting lights, and candy-inspired arcade games tucked into corners. The lighting is soft and strange, the walls often glowing, and the whole thing feels a bit like walking through someone’s dessert-fuelled dream.

You could move through quickly, treat it like a novelty, grab a few photos and be done in 20 minutes. But if you give it a little more time – if you stop performing and start playing – it reveals itself as something more satisfying. The space is cleverly built: immersive but not overwhelming, interactive without being chaotic. It’s made for kids, yes, but not just for them. Adults seem equally content – less because of nostalgia, and more because the museum gives them rare permission to stop being adults for an hour.

The visit ends, inevitably, at the café – the final room in what feels like a Willy Wonka factory built for Instagram. The colour scheme continues: pastel drinks, rotating ice cream flavours, candy displays so carefully arranged they might as well be art direction. On Wednesdays, there’s a discount and a one-day-only flavour, for those who enjoy a sense of occasion with their sugar.

There’s nothing behind it – the Museum of Candy isn’t turning sugar into symbolism or sneaking in a critique of consumer culture. And that’s exactly why it works. It lets you move freely through colour and sound for a while, no questions asked. In a city that constantly performs meaning and scale, that kind of simplicity feels almost radical.