Glazed, Grainy and Gross: When Hype Replaces Quality
Decision-making can be hard. When you enter your nearby Sephora or look online for new products, you have an array of options that, at one point or another, start to blend together– especially lip products. Every beauty brand out there has a lip product, whether it’s lipstick, lip gloss, or lip balm. There are some differences but again it blurs together. As the consumer, it can be hard to make a choice. Ideally, we would want a product that reaches the equilibrium between a low price and good quality. But what happens when we have a product that's overpriced and isn't even the best quality?
Introducing the Rhode Lip Peptide treatment: an eighteen-dollar lip balm product. A little pricey maybe, but there are certainly more expensive ones (Currently typing this as I eye my beloved Summer Fridays Lip Balm). The real kicker though is girls on TikTok are now reporting they will once a month need to boil their Rhode lip product because it’s too grainy.
Customers have to boil their Rhode lip tint to get rid of the little grains in the product. Otherwise, you’ll apply the lip tint and it will feel like you have bits of sand on your lips. Personally, I don’t want my everyday lip product to leave me feeling reminded of being face-planted at the beach. It’s unsettling to hear this coming from the up-and-coming beauty brand.
Rhode has been very successful, now reported to be valued at around 1 billion dollars as the owner, Hailey Bieber, seeks a buyer. Bieber is Alec Baldwin’s niece and a successful supermodel, and now wife to well-renowned musician Justin Bieber. As the owner of Rhode Beauty, she’s deemed as the iconic face of clean beauty culture.
Rhode is popular because Hailey Bieber made it popular. Bieber’s influence on young girls is undeniable, as she’s behind several viral food-inspired beauty trends. But for each beauty trend she sets off, she has paired it with a product of hers: Glazed Doughnut skin with her Glazed Milk toner, Strawberry Girl makeup with her Pocket Blush, Latte makeup with her Peptide Lip Shape. The list exemplifies Bieber’s ability to take her audience’s attention and direct it to something material that she can profit off of. Additionally, Rhode has done several pop-ups that went viral and only further pushed more attention onto the brand. Plus, how can we forget the Rhode x Tate McRae promotion that highlighted their new lip liner product? Overall, the brand has done a good job at pushing a clean beauty and leaning into the clean girl aesthetic that Hailey Bieber has built her success off of. With their lip products, the promotions make it seem each tube contains a little bit of her viral essence.
However, despite all the praise the brand has gotten for the marketing and promotion, the products unfortunately fall short. Grainy lip gloss doesn’t sound or even feel like it matches the clean girl aesthetic. If anything, it almost sounds dirty. That’s the reality of the matter here. The product quality does not match the aspirations the marketing promotes, betraying the consumer. There’s something unethical and uninspiring to know that a viral lip product is getting so much praise despite the disappointing performance.
There is also a science behind celebrity endorsements. Typically, when consumers are faced with celebrity-backed products versus non-celebrity products, they will more quickly look to the former. A good celebrity knows how to cast a spotlight on themself. With someone as shiny as a celebrity, our attention goes away from the product and onto the prestige that surrounds the figurehead. Thus, with Rhode lip treatments, we are faced with an immense array of lip products. However, Hailey Bieber’s face behind her lip product stands out much more than the various other options.
Of course, the phenomenon isn’t exactly unique to beauty. Celebrity influence can seep into every category, like the Kardashian Crumbl Cookie line. The Kardashians aren’t necessarily known for their love of sweets. So it’s interesting to hear that Kourtney Kardashian’s cookie went viral for her bizarre recipe. It was a flourless, sugar-free chocolate cake. It went viral due to the numerous TikToks of people reacting with disgust to Kourtney’s cookie, summarized best in this TikTok ranking people’s reactions.
Why would Crumbl make such an awful product? Part of me wonders if it was done purely as a publicity stunt or if they were obeying Kourtney Kardashian’s wishes, who is notorious for her restrictive diet habits. The cookie line definitely drew attention to the brand and the family, doing something right. Once again, it demonstrates how virality and celebrity influence push us towards the idea of a product rather than the quality of a product.
But it’s not just products we fall for, experiences can fall into the mix too. Take Coachella, for example. It seemed that Coachella this year was a rough experience for the average person. Often on social media, we see influencers having a lavish time at the music festival. According to Forbes, people were using payment systems like Klarna to afford the experience, running up to at least a thousand dollars a weekend. For that much money, ideally, the experience would be lavish? Unfortunately, festival-goers on TikTok reported waiting in long lines for the showers, rough camping set-ups, and heavily overpriced food. We are witnessing Gen Z put themselves into debt for a musical experience that doesn’t cater kindly to anyone who isn’t rich or an influencer.
How much money are we willing to fork over for the sake of celebrity prestige? Clearly it’s enough to go into debt for Coachella tickets. But at the same time, we risk the quality of a product. If we keep risking quality for prestige, I fear we will find ourselves losing the plot on what should be praised in a product. Good lip gloss is good lip gloss, it’s not grainy, it's smooth and glides on the lips in a fluid and satisfying motion. It is hydrating and isn’t overhyped because one supermodel owns it. Maybe it’s time we start worshiping quality over clout. Maybe it’s time we stop falling for good advertising.