Hailey Bieber has mastered the art of the tease.
For months, the founder has had fans eagerly speculating and posting about when her 2-year-old beauty brand, Rhode, would introduce blush. Bieber has over 52 million followers on Instagram, over 12 million on TikTok and over 2 million on YouTube.
Early lab samples of the cream stick-format blush showed up in Bieber’s Instagram posts back in March, and she has since continued to post versions of the product as she’s developed it. “This blush has been a two-year process,” she told Glossy via Zoom last week. “I really wanted us to take our time with it. There are so many good blushes on the market that I wanted us to come with our own specific point of view.”
The result is Pocket Blush — a “hybrid product,” that, like Rhode’s other offerings, is “skin-first” for a “dewy, glowy, gorgeous-on-the-go” look, Bieber said. The product is infused with peptides, like Rhode’s serum and its hero Peptide Lip Treatment and Peptide Lip Tint, as well as tamanu oil. Bieber wanted a cream blush that would “give you a glow and also last, [and give a] really beautiful, natural-looking flush to the cheeks,” she said. “We worked very hand-in-hand with the lab to create to create this blush.”
“There’s real artistry makeup and then there are things that are more for everyday and easy-to-apply, [like a product offering a] flush of color. That’s what this is,” Bieber said of Pocket Blush, which comes in six shades and will sell for $24 each, like the rest of the brand’s products, via Rhodeskin.com.
Portability was also key to Bieber, and she achieved that with Pocket Blush, she said: “I like the way it travels the most. You can toss it in your pocket or throw it in your purse and bring it everywhere. And I like anything that feels like you can either apply it with your finger or you can put it directly on the skin. I like convenience.”
Blush, she said, is a product she relies on, even on bare skin, to bring “vibrancy” to the face. “You could be wearing nothing and you could be looking so tired that day, and if you just give a pop to your cheeks, it changes the whole face,” she said.
Bieber seemed to hint at Rhode’s future in color cosmetics. Rhode’s tagline is “one of everything really good.” And, according to Bieber, her makeup essentials are blush, a brow product, a lip liner, a lip product and concealer. This minimalist philosophy will always inform the color side of the business as it grows, she said. “If I have all those things in my bag, I feel like I could go live on a desert island for a month and be fine and be happy,” she said, adding, “I’m not going to give you liquid eyeliner. It’s never going to be my vibe.”
For the Pocket Blush’s launch campaign, Bieber models alongside Paloma Elsesser and Alex Consani. “We wanted to play with the idea of ‘Pocket Blush’: It’s tiny, it’s pocket-size, it’s bite-size. So we wanted to play with size and scale in the campaign. You’ll see really big [packaging] or really tiny [packaging],” Bieber said.
Of the brand’s larger marketing strategy, much of it has been organic, Bieber said, referencing the fervor around the brand’s phone case, which launched in February. “A big part of the marketing that has fed into Rhode has just been me naturally sharing and showing how it applies to my life and how I’m using it,” she said. It will show up in a photo one day, in a slide, and people will be like, ‘Wait, what’s that?’ It will start to get people questioning and asking about it. And I like to drive questions and people’s curiosity around it, because I think it makes it feel exciting.”
