Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard some interesting rumblings on the ground regarding Hailey Bieber’s popular beauty brand Rhode.
From LA to London, the whisper networks have been alive with chatter about the next entry into the Hailey-verse. Between the Sydney bakery pop-up, collabs with Magnum ice cream, not to mention the seemingly endless Erewhon collabs, what we’re about to reveal may not be entirely surprising. Even still, we’re thrilled to bring you a tantalizing new scoop: Rhode is finally launching a food brand. Right?
According to unreliable sources close to the Rhode team, GLAZED by Rhode is due to debut later this year as a line of artisanal donuts and other sweet treats based on the now iconic skincare brand. Expected offerings include glazing milk and cacao espresso donuts but also some surprising options like the strawberry glaze syrup in the shape of its skincare bottle.
At Dot Dot Dot, we can’t wait to take our first bite when GLAZED lands……or, we would, if anything that was written or shown in this article was true. Still, it wouldn’t be so far-fetched.
MOONSHOT is Dot Dot Dot’s bi-monthly series exploring what brands should build next, if they stopped thinking incrementally and started expanding their universe properly.
MOONSHOT takes a cultural signal, pairs it with a brand sitting on obvious but unrealized potential, and builds the expansion that actually fits. We interrogate why it makes strategic sense, how it strengthens the ecosystem, and what it would take to bring it to life, commercially, culturally, operationally.
The ideas can sound slightly delusional at first. That’s usually a good sign.
This series is a brain child between ourselves and Edmond Lau: cultural strategist, writer, meme theorist, and recovering IP lawyer, whose work on internet aesthetics and the politics of taste has been cited everywhere from The New Yorker to The Atlantic. Lau understands how culture mutates online. We’re interested in what happens when you turn that understanding into infrastructure.
Hailey Bieber wants you to eat her. In a 2023 interview with New York Magazine, she put it plainly: “I want you to bite me. I want to be so delicious that you can’t resist.”
Bieber doesn’t want to be literally eaten. She is, of course, referring to her skincare philosophy and billion dollar beauty phenom, Rhode. Described colloquially as ‘glazed donut skin’, the Hailey Bieber skin aesthetic is a face that looks so luminous, so dewy, so perfectly glazed, that you can’t help but want to take a bite.
Despite its absurdness, there’s no doubting its impact. “Glazed donut” skin has transported Rhode to stratospheric heights. In just three years, and starting with only three products, Rhode has gone from zero to an insane 9 figure exit with E.L.F. Cosmetics in a deal that had every skincare brand dripping with envy, and every cool girl’s face dripping with Rhode’s glazing milk.
You can attribute Rhode’s success to a whole laundry list of factors including Hailey’s star-power, its cleverly designed pop up spaces, or Rhode’s uncanny ability to tap the zeitgeist regarding talent pairing, color studies, and drop releases. For us though, there’s something special about Rhode’s use of food as a branding tool.
With a product range that includes Strawberry Peptide Lip Tints, Glazing Milks, and Barrier Butters, Bieber and her brand Rhode are the leading purveyors of what beauty writer Jessica Delfino has termed “food face”— a phenomenon where beauty and skincare brands invoke the visual and sensorial vernacular of food to sell products that promise to not only make you look like a scrumptious donut but feel just as tempting.
“Food face” is not without its critics. Delfino herself finds the concept grotesque. In her view, it’s a philosophically cannibalistic way of marketing that turns women into inanimate objects to be owned and consumed. In the eyes of the market though, Rhode proved to be an irresistible treat
Given that $200 million of Bieber’s deal with E.L.F. is contingent on Rhode’s continued success, new growth has to come from somewhere and beyond its core beauty offering the richest territory could be in food.
Examine Rhode’s recent movements and it looks like Rhode is beginning to explore ambitions beyond its core. The viral lip gloss phone case tapped into tech as a fashion accessory while the Rhode Mallorca beach club could signal a potential experiment in hospitality.
You might say that these activities are all in service of selling skincare, but then Rhode has never really been about the skincare alone. It’s always been about selling the idea of the Hailey Bieber universe. The only question remains is what new space makes sense for Rhode to start playing in?
With the inexorable connection between Rhode and food, a tempting question beckons us. In this edition of MOONSHOT, we explore what happens when Rhode goes from making skincare that sounds good enough to eat, to making food that makes you delicious from the inside out.
Forget cars and clothes. What’s in your pantry and your bathroom vanity have become just as important of a flex.
Fashion was once the default medium through which to communicate taste and status. As Mrs Prada said, ‘“What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language.”
But the surfaces that communicate taste have dispersed. Fashion is no longer as magnetic as it once was.
Rhode is by no means alone in its food obsession. Jacquemus used a piece of toast emblazoned with its logo as a show invite. Prada acquired Marchesi pasticceria years ago. Dior, Chanel, and a growing number of luxury maisons have staked claims in hospitality, recognizing that food is now a fully legitimate terrain for brand expression. In New York, Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar is one of the most coveted reservations in a city drowning in ‘it’ restaurants. Brands are even starting to experiment with ice cream as a key marketing vehicle.
It makes financial sense too. For brands, expanding their forays into dining and food is a robust remedy for deepening economic downturns. The high profit margins of cafe ventures are lower cost revenue generators compared to other plays such as celebrity endorsements.
It’s an example of the lipstick effect in action. When the aspirational luxury consumer is priced out of bags and ready-to-wear by seemingly unending price increases, they turn to more accessible treats. Of those treats, beauty has always been an absorber of that appetite. Today, food holds that same power.
The personal luxury goods market shrank in 2024 for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, shedding roughly 50 million consumers along the way. But while bags and ready-to-wear contracted, Bain flagged gourmet food and fine dining as one of the year’s standout growth categories.
Rhode occupies a unique position in the beauty space. Its connection with food is already so strong that should it step into food more formally, it would feel unexpected but unsurprising.
The art direction already constantly conjures hunger pangs. In one shot, Hailey pours glazing milk over herself as if winking to us ‘drink up’. In another, syrup lusciously envelops a tube of cinnamon bun lip peptide. All of it is tempting your appetite (not to mention your wallet).
But beyond the visuals and language, Rhode is also right in the perfect price range to explore launching sweet treats.
In last months’ interview with Time Magazine, Bieber herself has noted that the brand, while premium, is never intended to be inaccessible. It’s aspirational without being exclusionary.
This is a positioning that maps onto the “little treat” economy we discussed earlier. Both a $25 lip treatment and a $16 smoothie are affordable entry points into a luxurious Hailey Bieber worldview.
To capture a new demographic, a brand typically has to move up or downmarket within their category. Expanding horizontally is a risky move given that, more often than not, a brand’s equity may not translate well into another vertical. Here, that’s not the case. Rhode can move food without the usual associated brand risk because it has spent years building equity and association with sweet treats.
But why should Rhode go from likening its products to food to actually creating a food brand? It’s a valid concern. If the interest is in playing with the tension between the edible and inedible, will fully sending it into food ruin the tease?
Maybe, but what this view ignores is that Rhode has already built a successful food brand in the background.
There are of course the famous Erewhon collaborations. The Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie is the first thing that surfaces in the collective imagination when anyone says “Erewhon smoothie.” The Valentine’s Day Strawberry Glaze Soft Serve is less iconic, but similarly evidences Bieber’s appetite for crossing over. In 2023, to celebrate the release of the strawberry peptide lip tint, Rhode collaborated with Krispy Kreme on a limited edition strawberry glaze donut. Just last week, Rhode posted branded popsicles without any context.
They’ve taken it into the physical realm too. This past February, Rhode launched a collaborative pop-up “The Rhode Bakery” experience with Sydney bakery A.P. Bakery as an activation to support Rhode’s entry into the Australian market. The curated menu included pastries such as Rhode blueberry waffles, Rhode lamingtons, and takeaway coffee.
Collectively, these activations represent a fluency with food that is fertile ground to at least experiment with more formally.
And it’s a booming market too. A survey by Barclays of UK consumers in 2024 found that despite middling economic conditions, 41% of respondents sought ways to treat themselves, and within that cohort, a sizable 38% preferred desserts as their vice over vintage shopping or bargain hunting.
It’s a meta that has made headlines in The Guardian, Fast Company and The Observer. Meanwhile, more broadly, the global bakery products market size is projected to grow from $515.89 billion in 2026 to $326.55 billion by 2034.
Lifestyle brands going into food and beverages is nothing new. If it wants to stand out, however, Rhode can’t just open a generic cafe, slap a logo on a box and call it a day. Instead, it needs to create a food offering that links directly to the Haileyverse.
In the food context, what this looks like is an offering that taps into the same ‘clinically backed’ feeling of Rhode, while remaining aspirational and beautiful.
The strawberry skin glaze smoothie is emblematic. Okay at 780 calories, it’s not exactly good for you if you have it everyday, but with ingredients like collagen and sea moss, it’s not the worst sweet treat you could opt for.
In our view, the failing was that it was marketed as something ‘healthy’. Instead, Rhode should create desserts that are unashamedly indulgent, but not horrifically processed slop food.
It’s not a wellness brand and it won’t be a supplement play. GLAZED is an unashamed purveyor of indulgence. While any brand can start launching its own line of pastries. What makes GLAZED different is the uniquely ‘Rhode’ sensibility.
The food context is exhausting. Food brands rally around the opposing poles of optimization or excess, but it ends up nauseating.
At one end of the spectrum, deeply boring protein-maxxed products take all the joy out of food, turning what should be fun into pure fuel instead. At the other end of the spectrum, independent bakeries like Radio Bakery in New York, or Jolene in London lean into the analog, artisanal craft aspect of pastry-making. Yet, the mild but inescapable pretension has found the bakeries memed into punchlines from Shoreditch to Vilnius.
There’s room for Rhode to create a food brand that’s both playful, yet also deeply contemporary.
In other words, for Rhode to take the same approach with its desserts as it does with its skincare: make something simple, clever, but executed well and most importantly, delicious. “One of everything is really good”.
The menu itself is discrete and concise, mirroring the trio of products that Rhode initially launched its beauty line with.
Strawberry Glaze — Strawberry reduction glaze, freeze-dried strawberry dust, collagen worked into the brioche dough.
Cacao Espresso — Ethically sourced 70% dark chocolate and espresso filling.
The Original Glaze — Classic brioche dough, classic glaze, iridescent finish. Glazed Donut Skin in donut form.
Where the interest lies is in the presentation and experience.
The ordering experience is presented more akin to skincare than dessert. The sample donuts are shown in a display case next to the skincare products they are inspired by, almost as if they were part of a ‘kit’.
When you buy a donut, it’s like you’re buying a luxury product. The donut is taken and placed in a signature Rhode box. The unique Rhode feeling carries over the experience of eating the actual donut.
Usually, the annoying thing about eating a donut is the powder and stickiness. Not this time. Just like the Rhode lip gloss phone case, the Donut won’t come in the usual paper box. Instead, it comes with a special Rhode donut holder that doubles as a coffee sleeve.
On the back: an ingredient list formatted like a skincare label. And a ‘Directions for Use’ field that reads:
“Consume within 24 hours.”
On the digital side, it’s a similar story. The vibe is high def food porn video in motion.
Log on and you’re presented with a 3D high resolution donut that feels like a collision of an Apple product launch and Rhode. Using your mouse, you’ll be able to orbit around a perfectly round, glossy donut, even zooming in impossibly close without losing any sharpness.
Every crack in the glaze, every texture is visible for your eyes to feast upon. The look is so hyperreal that it’s hard to tell whether it’s a render, a photo or something entirely AI.
Contrasting against the imagery is POV accompanying selfie-style footage in the signature Rhode style, featuring Hailey and a cast of Rhode ambassadors holding donuts, about to take the first bite. Imagine fingers grazing the icing, lips parting. Pure anticipation of the Rhode donut experience.
You won’t be able to buy the donuts directly on the website but that’s not the point. GLAZED should be experienced in person. At the bottom of the page, a pop-up will ask for your location so that once you are fully immersed in the GLAZED world, you can get notified of when GLAZED will arrive in your city.
Phase I: The Announcement Video
FADE IN:
INT. LABORATORY — DAY
Sterile and Immaculate. Don’t touch anything.
SCIENTISTS in white coats move with purpose. Formulations are dropped one drop at a time into glass vials. Drip Drip Drip. A centrifuge spins.
On the stainless steel bench lies a single glazed donut lit as a new skincare product.
The door opens.
HAILEY enters dressed casually - her informality contrasted against the stark clinical seriousness of her environment. She looks around, clocks the donut, picks it up.
Beat.
She takes a bite.
HAILEY: It’s really good, guys.
The scientists do not react. They continue their work.
CUT TO BLACK: GLAZED BY RHODE. THIS SUMMER.
POST CREDIT:
Hailey tears off a piece. She holds it out to the nearest scientist. He is very serious. He has never not been serious. Want some?
CUT TO BLACK.
Phase II: The Tease
We tease GLAZED in the classic Hailey Bieber tradition.
Put it out there with almost no explanation and keep the audience wanting more.
Partner with skincare influencers to all suddenly start stopping their routine to randomly take a bite out of a donut after using a Rhode product. “Why is everyone eating a donut, and what is this donut?” people will start to wonder. Release one video. Then another. Then another.
We keep it moving. A video tour of the Rhode offices has Hailey walking past a pastry related mishap in the background.
Then we take things into the real world. New orders from Rhode come with a card inside in the shape of a donut, and small printed donut holder. What? Why?
Hailey then does pap walks with a donut in the Rhode donut holder. What is she holding? She’s coming out of an Erewhon? Is this a new test product?
And finally around town and on social media, shorts and posters of it boys taking bites out of donuts. Haris Dickinson. Pierce Abernethy. Nico Hiraga. Loyle Carner, Role Model, Steve Lacy. We invert the usual ‘hot girl eats a burger’ ads. Sweet boys with sweet treats?
Phase III: The Pop-Ups
How do we distribute it? Location-specific pop-ups in Sydney, London, New York and Los Angeles, each in collaboration with an independent local bakery.
Partners and creators support with an online conversation to talk about their relationship with treats too.
Paris Starn talks about the aesthetic appeal of a donut. Pierce Abernethy talks about his experience baking for the first time. Loyle Carner talks about the joy of sweet treats and the collective experience of baking in his cooking school.
In particular, the idea that a treat should be a treat, that the “guilt-free” alternative is almost always a slightly disappointing version of the real thing. Rhode doesn’t do guilt-free. Rhode does delicious. The treats are inspired by Rhode skincare but are absolutely created to taste good.
Unlike traditional donut brands that strive for uniformity, we lean into geographic specificity. The particular dough of the Rhode donut is created by determination of the partner pastry chef. The unifying element are its glazes.
This ensures that no two cities have the same Rhode donut experience. Further, it allows Rhode to truly support the individuality of a local business.
City Editions
Beyond the mainstays mentioned, each launch will have its own exclusive donut only available at that location. The ingredients will be rooted in local food culture.
Again, the idea is to make Rhode a destination wherever city you visit. The specific donuts will be created in partnership with a local bakery or pastry chef but to give an idea, here are what the exclusives could be.
GLAZED × Sydney by AP Bakery — Reishi Lamington — Marine collagen brioche dough. Dark chocolate and cacao coating is infused with reishi mushroom powder. Rolled in toasted desiccated coconut. Centre-filled with raspberry jam.
GLAZED × London by Arome — Ashwagandha Earl Grey — Brown butter brioche infused with ashwagandha. Earl Grey glaze infused with blue butterfly pea flower. Dried lavender, candied lemon zest.
GLAZED × Los Angeles by Republique — Sea Moss Pomegranate — Rose water brioche dough with sea moss gel. Deep pomegranate reduction glaze.
GLAZED × New York by Lysée — Miso Honey Manhattan — Black sesame brioche dough with white miso paste folded into the butter. Raw wildflower honey glaze finished with a whiskey reduction. Flaked sea salt, toasted sesame, a single candied orange peel.
Phase IV: GLAZED doesn’t have a home address. It has several.
Just like the boys and girls that buy Rhode, GLAZED is always on the move. To maintain scarcity and desire, GLAZED never stays in one place. Instead it travels all over. Erewhon in LA in the Summer, London Selfridges Food Hall in the winter, DSM Ginza in the spring.
The rotation approach also keeps the press cycle moving. Every time the location rotates, Rhode seizes an opportunity to launch a new cultural signal about where Rhode sees itself and where it sees culture.
The local partner patisserie model makes this operationally viable. By using local bakeries instead of producing in-house, Rhode doesn’t have to move a kitchen, it can simply move an R around.
The customer behavior it produces also reflects the fanatic nature of Rhode’s customers. People will follow it. They check. They share when it arrives somewhere new. GLAZED becomes a thing you catch and chase across continents.
A monthly subscription box (a Rhode “ritual kit” with 2 donuts, a sample-size lip treatment, and a printed card. This is the “little treat” economy made literal and recurring).
Erewhon permanent collab (not just a smoothie but a GLAZED pastry case, year-round. Erewhon is already Rhode’s natural universe).
Hotel/airline partnerships? Imagine a Rhode amenity kit with a mini GLAZED box. Four Seasons, not Delta, obviously.
At a 30,000ft view, Rhode is a feeling. To lather yourself with Rhode is to embody the vibe of being so luminous, so effortlessly enviable, that people can’t help but want a slice of your life. GLAZED is that impulse expressed literally, not to mention edible.
As the personal luxury market contracts and aspirational consumers reallocate their spending, the brands that win will be the ones that colonise more of everyday life. Deliberately positioned at the affordable edge of premium, Rhode is better placed than almost any brand out there to make the move.
Throughout the years, Rhode has spent countless hours building equity through food. Now with GLAZED, we finally get to taste it. Want a bite?
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