What Is It About Hailey Bieber?

On Saturday, I got a matcha in LA. But not just any matcha: an iced matcha with homemade banana syrup, cold foam, and cinnamon, a real monstrosity, made in collaboration with somebody named Amelia Gray. This was a Saturday after all. And the barista flipping the iPad around to me, asking me to add a tip to this $8, barely-caffeinated purchase, wasn’t just any barista.

She was conventionally beautiful, as many of the baristas in LA are, but she had a quality to her that was simultaneously familiar and illustrious. Her blonde hair was pulled into a tidy slick back. She lacked a harsh cheek contour, but had a dewy, bronzed complexion, free of muddiness or orange streaks. A wash of apricot blush was boldly positioned on the apples of her cheeks and near her nose. Beauty influencers had always taught me to blend blush towards my ears to slim my face. Too much blush near your nose makes your face appear round, and I had been told this was undesirable. But this girl’s face didn’t look cherubic. She looked healthy, spritely. Bouncy. She lacked any eye makeup, aside from clear brow gel slicking her brows upward, as neatly lacquered as her hair.

Who did this girl look like? Was she someone I knew from home? A girl in my sister’s sorority? An LA influencer I’d been served on Instagram? As I waited for my matcha and stared at her, it dawned on me. This girl is all of these people, and all of them are intentionally and unknowingly adopting subtle aesthetic cues from one particular modern girl deity: Hailey Bieber.

I am not saying this to appear coolly detached from mass girl interests, but truly, from the bottom of my heart, I have never quite understood why or how Hailey Bieber has garnered mass adoration (and mass hatred) in recent years. She’s always kind of reminded me of the girls that my crushes had crushes on in high school. The girls that had this kind of beige magic about them that I unfairly resented them for having. I never understood what they had that I didn’t, until I realized it was more so what they were withholding. Their non-expressiveness and seamless adoption of an immaculate, inoffensive, feminine-with-an-edge style, all Ugg boots, flared yoga pants, and North Face puffers, made them the perfect vessel for projection and easy desire. They followed the tried and true formulas for It Girlism to a T. An obvious, almost safe, option for a crush, or object of feminine aspiration among peers. This was far less embarrassing than desiring someone like me, a chronically online “feminist” who paired black-and-white checked capris with high-top yellow Converse and spoke her mind too freely.

I do not know Hailey Bieber personally and am not going to pretend to. I’m far more interested in her public image, and what about it has launched a thousand copycats (myself, at times, included) and a brand with a billion-dollar valuation.

Hailey’s influence on the fashion and beauty habits of young women in the 2020s calls to mind the Kardashians’ impact on the aughts and early 2010s, and Emma Chamberlain’s on the late 2010s. Either camp can be credited with racks and shelves of mall stores being stocked with bodycon dresses and liquid lipsticks, and teddy jackets and scrunchies, respectively.

But unlike the Kardashians and Emma Chamberlain, Hailey has nothing especially extraordinary about her personal style. She is a beautiful woman, no doubt, but her visuals don’t feel remarkable or “new” enough to elicit the divisive, frenzied response that they do. She didn’t invent slick-backed buns or dewy makeup, but has somehow become synonymous with them, shepherding the “clean girl” to the masses and engineering a kind of shorthand for being stylish and beautiful that can be watered down for middle-class American teenagers, or scaled up for affluent reality TV stars and influencers.

Hailey’s easy, benign, canned style and visuals are what make her the perfect object of mass appeal and mass loathing simultaneously. She is a blank, innocuous Every Woman for popular white girls, or those who look up to them.

The hallmarks of Hailey’s look are “glazed” skin with minimal contour and lots of sheer bronzer, blush, and highlighter, nude lips, straight brunette or “bronde” hair, either minimally styled or slicked back in a low bun, slim, black ovalular sunglasses, blue jeans and a neutral T-shirt or tank top, sneakers or loafers, a mini skirt or dress and simple heels, and gold, chunky earrings. Everything neutrally colored with little to no logos.

As opposed to the Kardashian-driven maximalism of the 2010s, which was rife with varied fabric textures, colors, and logos, unnatural body shapes, Victoria’s Secret curls and false lashes, Hailey’s look is far more pared down. Her everyday wardrobe can be easily replicated with a three-figure trip to Brandy Melville or Edikted. Her makeup is less about technique and more about using the right foolproof, glowy products that conceal the seams of your handiwork well.

But she’s not the first to wear highlighter and jeans and a T-shirt. In fact, Vox points out that Glossier actually referred to glowing skin as “glazed” and akin to a “Krispy Kreme” five years before Hailey coined her famous “glazed donut” line. But with Hailey, it’s less about what she’s wearing and more about how she’s wearing it: in a manner that is just barely chic and perfectly balanced, neither too feminine nor too masculine, neither too polished nor too casual. It’s ubiquitous, good taste, so surface-level that it requires no singular understanding or appreciation for fashion or beauty to adopt it seamlessly.

Interestingly, when I polled my Substack subscribers about why Hailey Bieber is so appealing to young girls and women, many pointed out the fact that she’s white and skinny. What makes this more interesting is the fact that Hailey’s style is decidedly not ultra-white. Much of her success actually comes from repackaging beauty trends popularized by Black and Latina women for white girls. The slicked-back bun, chunky gold hoops, and minimal makeup with nude-pink lips actually call to mind many Black beauty icons from the 90s, particularly Sade. Hailey also caught a bit of heat in 2022 for trying to coin “brownie glazed lips,” which consisted of clear gloss atop brown lip liner, a look originating among Black and Latina women in the 80s and 90s. She is a beauty translator of sorts for a younger, more unknowing generation of white girls.

Similarly, through her brand rhode, Hailey has managed to rebrand skincare-forward, “no-makeup makeup” for a new class of makeup-wearers, now owning what was once Glossier’s signature class of products. Glossier is a brand that’s decidedly unsexy to today’s teenagers, with its sterile, explicitly empowering messaging reeking of Buzzfeed optimism. I don’t think Gen Z are as drawn to Glossier’s literally millennial pink “You Look Good” sentiments, as they stink of the cheugy “You Can Sit With Us” and “We Should All Be Feminists” generation. They are drawn to brands and figures with more edge.

Not only are the rhode products genuinely high-quality, but the branding is far sexier and aesthetically aspirational. Comparing rhode’s website to Glossier’s, the former shows models exposing way more skin and Gen Z pouts, as opposed to the latter’s age-appropriate waist-up, full-tooth smiles. It’s clear which one is more appealing to teenage girls who want to look and act more like the adult women they’re seeing on their For You pages. Compared to rhode’s nonchalant, easy cool, Glossier almost reads like Kidz Bop.

But despite Zoomer distaste for millennial signifiers, there’s an aspect of Hailey’s girl boss identity that’s clearly appealing too. But it’s not the She-EO, shattering-the-glass-ceiling girl bossery that caught fire during the Obama administration. It’s more tied to being the captain of your destiny and fast-track-manifesting your dream life into existence. Many online are convinced that Hailey marrying Justin Bieber wasn’t the product of a whirlwind, happenstance romantic spark, but the result of her deliberately engineering the relationship into being and making it appear as a coincidence, very “Mastermind” by Taylor Swift.

There’s a famous clip of Justin and Hailey meeting as children when Justin was on his ascent to world domination, and Hailey was simply the tween daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin (brother to more infamous actor Alec Baldwin). Many splice this clip with compilations of Hailey looking for Justin in the crowd at events they’re both attending, presuming her calculated intentions. There’s something to be said about her nailing down one of the most famous musicians of the zillennial generation. To be the muse of one of the most desired teen heartthrobs in the world is awe-inspiring to young girls, and the idea that you could somehow “manifest” it into being is even more so.

It is helpful to have these kinds of off-the-shelf it-girl presets at your disposal. As someone who lacks a visual eye and experiences bouts of feeling feverishly uncomfortable in her skin, it’s helpful to know I can just throw on a cropped cotton tee, relaxed light wash jeans, and some glowy blush and be acceptable to society. Thanks to Hailey Bieber, getting dressed and putting on my makeup in the morning is a breeze, freeing up my brain to focus on things I actually want to think about, which I appreciate. Of course, I could always determine my own sense of style, which I sometimes think I do. But I always seem to find threads of the current supreme in my look, their influence as unsuspecting and sticky as sap stuck in my hair.

It’s inevitable for these kinds of trending uniforms to take hold. Still, the copy-and-paste nature of Hailey’s It Girl reign often feels disheartening. Whereas the vibrant Emma Chamberlain, Glossier, VSCO Girl era was more about adopting a general style “vibe,” the Hailey era feels hyper-prescriptive, involving many non-smiling influencers explaining the exact rhode bronzer or Summer Fridays lip product or Coach handbag to purchase to get the look. The VSCO Girl was at least boisterous; the Hailey girl is sterile, withdrawn, and particular.

But if you listen carefully and look past the vacant stares and angsty pouts, you can just pick up on the quiet desire for exceptionalism that today’s young women are harboring. All you have to do is just barely scratch off the veneer of gloss, and you can see it. A longing to be hot, loved, and “successful.” Who doesn’t want that? From the ruins of Target-branded Lizzo self-love anthems and quirky, socially anxious YouTubers emerges a hyper-specific aesthetic path to getting there. Not gilded in gold, but rather, glazed in it.

Still, empires fall, and so too will Hailey Bieber’s. It’s always unexpected when an outfit style as simple as a cropped T-shirt and slouchy jeans and a beauty look as seemingly timeless as glowing skin becomes dated, but it will. That, of course, is fine; it’s fun to look back on the trends we partook in, to bottle time through style. I just hope that the next It Girl has a bit more movement and sense of character attached to her image. But hopefully by then, I’ll have learned how to secure my blinders better. And maybe even actually figure out how to dress.