Hailey Bieber's Flesh-Eating Empire
Or: Why do we want to look like donuts?
Last night, Puck beauty correspondent Rachel Strugatz reported that Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand, Rhode, “made about $90 million in revenue from its website in the final two months of 2024” and “will be available at your local Sephora later this year.”
Bieber has built her cosmetics career on what I’ve previously called “food face,” or beauty trends inspired by various inanimate and ingestible objects: She’s championed glazed donut skin, brownie glazed lips, strawberry makeup, latte makeup, and cinnamon cookie butter hair. Her products include Glazing Milk, Glazing Fluid, Barrier Butter, and Strawberry Glazed Donut Lip Treatment (an official collaboration with Krispy Kreme) — as well as a few you can actually eat, like her Erewhon Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie and Cosmic Bliss Strawberry Glaze Soft Serve.
Clearly, consumers find this appetizing. But why? In light of Rhode’s newsy revenue numbers and Sephora expansion plans, I thought I’d revisit an article I wrote for the Sunday Times in 2023 on “The Rise & Rise Of Glazed Donut Skin” — and the trend’s ties to dehumanization, objectification, consumerism, and trauma (of the skin and psychic varieties). I’ve also included an update on Rhode’s latest launch, the Contouring Lip Shaper, at the end, so scroll down for that.
A version of the below article first appeared in the Sunday Times in October 2023.
Eat Me: The Rise & Rise Of Glazed Donut Skin
by Jessica DeFino
Feeling hungry? Here, nibble on Hailey Bieber. Really — it’s fine! “I want someone to want to take a bite out of my skin,” the model and beauty brand founder said in an interview with New York Magazine earlier this summer. “I want you to want to bite me because it looks so delicious that you can’t resist.”
Bieber is hardly alone here. A glut of recent beauty trends offer tips on looking less like you and more like a variety of foodstuffs: dewy dumpling skin, Jello skin and, Bieber’s personal go-to, glazed donut skin. (There’s even Saran Wrap skin if you want to save yourself for later.) While there are slight differences among them — Saran Wrap skin focuses on eliminating texture, jello skin on adding bounce; dumpling skin aims for dewiness, glazed donut skin for full-on gooeyness — all share the same core aesthetic: impossibly smooth, inordinately shiny and ultimately inhuman.
Achieving this effect, as one might imagine, demands sizable effort and investment. Exfoliants and oils, moisturizers and “beauty milks,” devices that subject the flesh to LED light and radiofrequency in the name of tightening, brightening, flooding and plumping — products totaling $768 in some cases, applied daily or twice-daily, ad infinitum.
“To want these kinds of results with bare skin is very shocking, because it doesn't make sense,” says Paris-based skin pharmacologist Dr. Elsa Jungman, Ph.D. Healthy skin should not look like food. “For me” — a scientist of the skin microbiome — “it’s hard to understand,” she says.
And yet, I’d like to try. On what can we blame the collective embrace of Food Face?
Dehumanization
Dehumanization is always on the menu when it comes to female beauty standards. Throughout history, women were peaches, pieces of meat, their skin compared to porcelain — a plate on which their beauty (cheeks like apples, lips like cherries) was served.
Today, skin is the main course. Skincare commands a larger portion of the beauty market pie than makeup and hair combined; a growth spurt accelerated by the 2016 election of U.S. President Donald Trump, the simultaneous start of Brexit, the subsequent roll-back of women’s rights and economic opportunities, and the feminist recentering of self-care in uncertain times.
Activists quoted the late Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare,” she said. Beauty brands slyly swapped the word “self” for “skin.” Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action.
And just like that, the industry undermined the feminist idea that women are people. It convinced women to funnel their finite time, money and energy into being pastries, instead.
Consumerism
This urge to replace what is living and inevitable (pores, pigmentation, wrinkles, blemishes) with what is inanimate and ingestible (flour, frosting) isn’t so surprising, really. It’s in line with decades of unrealistic beauty ideals, which exist to service “a secular society” that worships “ever-increasing industrial productivity,” Susan Sontag writes in On Women. The philosopher describes a sort of self-objectification that isn’t concerned with appealing to men, but rather, with deifying and even identifying with products.
If the male gaze describes the psychological condition of existing under patriarchy, the psychological condition of existing under capitalism could be called the “sale gaze.”
The existence of an internalized sale gaze explains the current beauty culture climate: the rise of the shelfie (an Instagram-worthy photo of one’s beauty products that, like the selfie before it, has come to communicate the poster’s “perceived identity”); the aforementioned conflation of “self-care” and purchasable skincare; and the era of ingestible beauty icons, marked by — and impossible without — significant and sustained product intervention. Beauty has become synonymous with buying. After all, when you see glazed donut skin, it’s not skin you’re seeing; it’s the layer of sheer, shiny, mass-produced skincare formulas on top of it.
It calls to mind the French phrase for window shopping, lèche-vitrine. Window licking. Beauty enthusiasts salivate over serums in their Google Chrome windows and hope to be transformed into something that — through the screen of a smartphone, through the panes of a TikTok grid — makes someone else salivate.
Food Face, then, is buying products to become a product. It’s consuming to be consumable.
Cannibalism
On that note, the flesh-as-foodstuffs craze could easily sit on a list with the Armie Hammer allegations and Yellowjackets and Bones and All and the Chelsea G. Summers novel A Certain Hunger as an example of pop culture’s obsession with cannibalism.
“Late-stage capitalism, most of us are realizing, isn’t delivering on its promise, and endless participation in grind-core hustle culture often feels like we’re being devoured one bite at a time,” Summers wrote in British Vogue on the origins of today’s human food fad. It may also be a way to “reclaim an appetite,” the author said.
Perhaps the pushed-down desire to stuff one’s face — discouraged by society, damped by Ozempic — is sublimated into the performance of a gleaming Krispy Kreme?
More likely, “bite me beauty” represents a sublimated desire for connection. To want to be devoured by another person is to want to be close to them, to be inside of them. And with loneliness and skincare sales both reaching record rates, it (kind of?) makes sense that cosmetic cannibalism is trending. See also: latte makeup, strawberry makeup, glazed brownie lips, blueberry milk nails.
Trauma
“My mom traumatized me!” laughed Nam Vo, the makeup artist who coined the term “dewy dumpling skin,” when I asked what inspired her creation. “When I was a child, she used to sit me next to her and be like, ‘Do you want these brown spots? Do you want melasma?’” Since then, Vo’s been on a mission to defeat nature — to whip her and clients’ skin into a state of ageless, poreless perfection and avoid a fate like her mother’s (having normal human skin that responds to the passage of time. Gross!). Aging is a “nightmare” and people with minimal beauty routines are “horrifying to me,” she says.
The trauma of Food Face is more than existential, though. It’s epidermal.
“The over-utilization of these products can have a paradoxical damaging effect on your skin,” confirms Neil Sadick, M.D., F.A.A.D, a dermatologist based in New York City.
The typical, multi-step, glazed-and-glowy skincare routine may sensitize the barrier and compromise the microbiome and acid mantle — the body’s built-in protective measures. The amount of moisture required for that wet-out-of-the-oven look makes the skin overly permeable, says aesthetician and product formulator Mary Schook, and prone to surface-level symptoms (redness, roughness, oiliness, flakiness, acne) as well as sun damage.
At the very least, constant stimulation of the skin barrier can cause inflammation. It’s thanks to that swelling that pores may “appear somewhat tighter” and smooth as a steamed dumpling, according to Dr. Sadick.
Self-annihilation has its own particular appeal, of course. “After the pandemic, we were sitting at home hopeless, dry, dehydrated, depressed,” Vo explains. The project of becoming “moist, dewy and delicious like a dumpling” — even if dermatologically inadvisable — functioned as a “light and cute” distraction from a world of horrors, and still does. (The horrors persist.)
Maybe a glazed-over complexion is the beauty industry’s answer to trad-wifery; a retreat into the age-old role of object?
The Death Drive
Then again, Freud might say the drive to emulate the inanimate is nothing more than the death drive in disguise — a spiritual longing to return to a non-sentient state, an acknowledgement of death as the aim of all life. I might agree.
Bieber, Vo and their dewy devotees might say, “Eat me.”
A timely postscript:
Today, Rhode launched its Contouring Lip Shaper: a “high-performance” lip liner that supposedly shapes the lips for “a contoured effect.” I think it’s interesting that the brand is introducing the language of fitness and body-contouring shapewear here — very Skims-coded — after years of capitalizing on the language and look of indulgence. Each of the 11 Lip Shaper shades evokes a workout: Lift, Press, Bend, Lunge, Twist, Balance, Stretch, Flex, Spin, Move, and (the kicker) Lean. The campaign imagery is fitness-themed, too:
Notably, there isn’t any size diversity among the models in the Lip Shaper campaign. That isn’t much of a departure for Rhode — while the company has featured some plus-size models in the past for its food-themed product launches, like Precious Lee for the Raspberry Jelly Lip Peptide Treatment, body diversity hasn’t been a consistent priority — but it’s a shift I’ll be keeping my eye on.
Additional theory! When I was deep in my "dieting phase," (aka anorexia) ALL I THOUGHT ABOUT was food. I wonder if food face fetishization dovetails with some literal hunger & emptiness.
I wonder how the very probable rise in food prices will affect this trend—as food becomes more of a luxury in many ways, beauty products that are food-like and/or claim to deliver food-like results may take on more of an air of luxury than they already do