The Hottest Girl in the Country Is Making Millions Off Us. To Find Out Why, I Did the Unthinkable.

Fame Hailey Bieber Is Rich, Hot, and Beloved. I Never Got Her. Until Now. I spent a week trying to get to the bottom of her massive appeal. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Scaachi Koul? Aug 13, 20261:55 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images, Don Arnold/WireImage via Getty Images, Gap, Amazon, and Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I don’t want to stand outside on a too-clean curb at the bottom of New York’s West Village in an oppressive heat dome but I have no choice. I live several subway stops away, in a borough with a joyful absence of Erewhons, the L.A.-based luxury grocery store best known for pissing me off on a business trip when I just need a lighter and a Diet Coke. Erewhon sells a lot of specialty smoothies, ones designed for both health and beauty, namely this “Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie.” The drink originally launched alongside Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand, Rhode, but is still on the menu at Erewhon. And I have to have it. To get a Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie outside of L.A., you have to be within a reasonable distance of Kith Ivy, a members-only sports club in Manhattan. (It’s inside an unmarked building, and through a mirrored door that I only found because security caught me feeling around a wall, sweating, looking for a handle.) Kith Ivy won’t let me wait in their lobby while the drink arrives, nor can I enter the smoothie bar to order for pickup; I’m not a member, just an interloper. Instead, I’m directed to stand outside like an honest-to-god moron, waiting for a delivery guy to bring me a smoothie full of almond milk, strawberries, vanilla collagen, and sea moss. I find the texture of smoothies repellent, and I’m also personally offended at the prospect of spending just over $20 on a smoothie. But to fully understand Bieber’s appeal to elder Gen Alphas and younger Gen Xers alike, my mission for the week, accessing this inaccessible drink seems paramount. It’s just one of several products Bieber has put her name on, including a recent line of wide-legged Gap jeans, her (middle) namesake beauty line Rhode, and her brand ambassadorship of companies like Mango and Skims. In the last year of her 20s, Bieber has proved to be one of the most dominant cultural forces when it comes to what white girls in big cities want to put on their faces, on their bodies, and in their tummies. The pro–Selena Gomez Redditors still might be out for her blood, but you have to give Bieber this much: She’s adeptly built a business well beyond her married last name, or her given one. Born to Stephen Baldwin, she married Justin Bieber in 2018, quickly becoming the adversary of teenage girls (and some delusional adult women) everywhere just as she changed her famous last name to another very famous one. While she’s worked with luxury fashion houses as a model and an influencer, we still know her best through her proprietary businesses. It’s a wild branding feat for someone with two very famous last names. All that notoriety, but what’s made her rich and famous as a real tastemaker is Rhode, a beauty company she named after herself and herself alone. She could have easily become an Instagram wife, but has instead slapped her face and nouveau last name on a host of products that have transformed her into one of the most successful trendsetters in the last decade of American white-girl culture. In 2022, Bieber launched Rhode alongside this smoothie I’m standing on the street waiting for like a sucker. Rhode—which was since bought by e.l.f. Beauty in a $1 billion deal—offers skincare products like Justin Bieber–designed pimple patches and “highlight milk,” and makeup including pinky-coral blushes and “peptide lip liners.” That said, you might recognize Rhode best by the incredible twist of branding and merchandise: the Rhode lip peptide phone case—an iPhone case in grays and browns and taupes with a slit for a Rhode lip product—which definitely doesn’t look like anything vaginal. Bieber has filled out her portfolio with her latest partnership, a line of Gap lowish-rise baggy jeans in different washes. For a scant $90, you too can feel like a model in oversize jeans. But even disconnected from her business ventures, Bieber’s aesthetic choices still make for persistent trends. The Rhode phone case is now somewhat ubiquitous, depending on how much time you spend with white teenagers and young women. Her manicures go viral and usually include names that evoke hunger: glazed doughnut, strawberry French, vanilla glaze, blueberry milk. This summer, fashion blogs have been writing up her cobalt nails, an electric blue that you might remember from your friend’s older sister’s toenails. These trends aren’t exactly hers—her nail tech Zola Ganzorigt and makeup artist Mary Phillips are responsible for the looks that Bieber makes all the rage. But it’s hard to know where their work ends and Bieber’s role as muse begins. No matter who’s actually in charge of the look, it’s Bieber who gets the credit for seemingly knowing what the next big thing in nail polish finishes or blush formula might be. While I’m waiting for my smoothie, I dig through my bag for my new Rhode products. I got myself a chocolate-brown phone case, in which my Peptide Lip Tint (shade: Toast) is nicely and definitely nonsexually nestled. The phone case, though instantly recognizable, is an ergonomic nightmare. Holding it with one hand while trying to navigate the subway during a heat wave has given me a hand cramp, and the bulbous feel of the case—lumpy, in order to accommodate the lip tint—makes you feel like you’re holding a misshapen potato. But give Bieber this: Having your lip gloss within arm’s reach makes for a sharp uptick in usage. It feels like I just added Toast (one of Bieber’s signature lip shades) to my daily routine and the tube is already markedly skinnier. The phone case, though clunky and genuinely hideous—and again, it looks like a labia minora—is a feat of marketing to be studied for ages to come. Rhode has put a woman’s two immediate needs together as one more thing you just have to buy, and something that forces you to use both products even more than you normally would. The phone case is bulbous but can still be comfortably tucked into the back pocket of the Gap jeans, though it strains the pocket the same way a large potato might. It fits, but at what cost? The allure of Rhode is only partly the products. The design consists of sleek brown and white and pink pods and tubes. There are no dramatic colors and no surprising formulas. The point of these products isn’t to make yourself stand out, it’s to find a way to be the best version of the everygirl, to fit in completely as your best self. Still waiting for my stupid smoothie, I run a Rhode blush in shade Freckle across my face, still warm from my morning Pilates class (Bieber-approved). Rhode products won’t transform you; the reality is that Hailey Bieber just looks like that. The look is low-maintenance (at least, by all appearances); flushed cheeks, minimal eye makeup, no heavy contouring, and full, moisturized lips. Rhode girls look like they’ve just run a few blocks to catch a taxi, sun-kissed and breathless and still perfect. Everything Bieber touches is about seeming effortless, from the products she markets through Rhode to the way she eats sushi in a sheet mask. She manages something complex in nimble fashion. She makes her audience think that all this allure is as easy as the right blush, the right manicure. The Gap jeans are, too, a paean to the effortless cool girl. Gap is a no-brainer brand for someone like Bieber, who’s already evoking the inherent chill vibe of ’90s Gap. The denim fits comfortably and as advertised, but the fit is naturally designed for a curveless frame. (These jeans, like much of Gap’s line, only go up to a size 35.) The Cut’s Carol Lee reviewed the full line, writing that the jeans “make me feel like a full-time ceramicist in the Lower East Side who wears the same thing every day (a white t-shirt and well-tailored, yet loose jeans) and looks chic doing it.” But I don’t generally look like a full-time ceramicist in the Lower East Side, so on me, the jeans are still just jeans. They fit a little higher than intended by Bieber, curse this short torso, but more urgently, they obfuscate my ass with a sheet of straight-legged dark-wash denim. This is maybe something Bieber, with her slight frame, can get away with. But for me, where my butt is at least 40 percent of my physical and moral value, this is a sin and a crime against the community. It’s remarkable that a celebrity like Bieber has become one of the most successful and dominant cultural pacesetters for a particular slice of femininity in North America. Bieber, born into celebrity, was normie-adjacent when it came to her relationship with Justin. She was a fan, just like us! Justin picking her felt like, to some of his fanbase, a rebellion against his true fans and his true love, Selena Gomez. But for others, it felt like a wish fulfilled, if vicariously. She climbed her way up the parasocial ladder, and built something worth envying once she got to the top. In someone like Bieber there’s a promise, even if it’s an unlikely one. She’s a girl just like you, who somehow managed to marry the pop star you were obsessed with as a kid. Ignore her famous family, ignore how much easier it was for her to get in those rooms: She’s modeling the best and brightest way to fit in. The products are average, everyday tools—a simple blush best spread by the warmth of your fingers, a smoothie that apparently makes you glow from the inside out, a phone case that doubles as a lip-tint holder so that you can be on the go and still look effortless. They’re expensive enough to feel like significant purchases, but not so expensive that you can’t access them at all. Even the Glazing Mist, which after several uses has still not revealed its purpose, feels like an accessible piece of model-performance. The product is intended to be used several times a day, wherever you are, as a way to refresh your skin and makeup. This, to me, is so laughable: What little spray could refresh my face after 30 minutes on the curb in Manhattan when it’s 97 degrees outside? But it’s all affordable, and all within reach at your local mall, and all designed to feel like anyone can own a piece of celebrity. My Rhode order with four products totals a little over $116, my jeans around $97 with shipping, my smoothie $43 with delivery fees and a fair tip, and my cobalt-blue manicure was free, because I owned that color long before Bieber wore it this summer. Her products tell a story like all celebrity endorsements, but her story is mostly fill-in-the-blanks. The makeup is subtle enough to be fully customizable, the smoothie is a palate-friendly strawberry drink, and jeans are notorious for being a staple in any wardrobe, revolutionized by the wearer’s taste. Even her marriage speaks to the marketable averageness she engenders. Someone as hot as Bieber is, too, dealing with an aggressively nonchalant man who can’t put on an ironed shirt. I’m on a fool’s errand trying to understand Bieber first, hoping to then better understand ourselves. In reality, the transference goes the other way: Bieber is the everygirl, just like you, whoever you are. She’s a mirror for the kind of girl so many of us wish we were, someone thin and white and beautiful and famous but never a diva. Someone who looks like she slipped into beauty, almost by accident. In my Rhode makeup, I don’t look like Bieber at all, and I barely even look like I’m wearing any product. Instead, I have something better. I get to feel like the kind of girl who only needs a little blush, a little lipgloss, and a little spritz to be able to face the day. (As opposed to what I actually need, which is a benzodiazepine, a long-wear concealer, and a running start at someone who has slighted me.) When my drink arrives, even the delivery driver seems surprised by how quickly I grab the order from him on the street. My slop-in-a-cup, a baby-pink dollop with streaks of strawberry pulp, cost more than a full breakfast for two at my nearest diner. I’m not big on smoothies—they taste like banana soup—but I want to remain open-minded. I spritz my face with one more squirt of the pointless Rhode Glazing Mist, and put my gigantic brown potato phone back in my pocket. I take a big sip of the smoothie, hoping to feel different: renewed by the sea moss, energized by organic avocado, titillated by strawberry pulp. How many smoothies do you have to drink before you start looking like Hailey Bieber? Surely it isn’t more than one. Beauty Celebrities Fashion Women