When Hailey Bieber was 18 years old and finding her footing in the modeling world, she would sometimes let slip that she was really into Greek mythology. In 2015, she recommended the Iliad and the Odyssey (the sorts of texts a recent high schooler, as Hailey was then, might be primed to name in a magazine interview) as good travel reads. As she told W later that year, “Homer is fascinating.”
Hailey, now 26, laughs when I bring this up. “It was my favorite thing I learned in school,” she confirms. “I was just so obsessed with the ideas and the stories of these gods and goddesses.”
Some years later, Hailey discovered that her middle name, Rhode—which would ultimately serve as the name of the blockbuster skin care brand she launched in 2022—descends from one such ancient deity: Rhode, the protectress and personification of the Dodecanese island of Rhodes. She was the sea-nymph daughter of Poseidon, mighty god of the ocean, and a wife of Helios, incandescent god of the sun; as some myths claim, the island itself was born of their union.
“If you go back, back, back and look,” Hailey says of the family name, which was pᴀssed down on her mother’s side, “it comes from that.”It’s just before dusk when Hailey and I meet on one of the red-velvet couches of Bambi’s, a private speakeasy bar at the Palm Heights resort on Grand Cayman. We have the space to ourselves, and it’s quiet in here with just the two of us. Outside, unsuspecting vacationers are catching the final rays of the day—prime time for a post-beach shower or pre-supper nap. Earlier that afternoon, Hailey and her pals, relatively inconspicuous despite being surrounded by other guests, waded in the translucent turquoise water sipping frozen drinks, their frosty hurricane glᴀsses balanced on a floating surfboard. “The Caribbean is a whole other level of thick,” she says. “I like the humidity because it makes my skin feel so yummy.”
As the fates would have it, Hailey Bieber would become a modern-day goddess, hailing not from the shores of the Aegean Sea but of the Hudson River. She is mythical among the Gen Z and millennial women who flock to buy her namesake peptide serums and berry-glazed Erewhon smoothies; who idolize her Sєxy-tomboyish style, her flawless beauty regimen, and her star-studded life.
Today, her brunette bob swept back, she’s wearing a taupe minidress and white leather flip-flops by The Row. She has delicate tattoos on her hands, gold rings stacked on her fingers, her nails painted with tiny strawberries. Her skin is clearer than an Instagram filter come to life—a front-facing reminder of why she is her own beauty brand’s best figurehead. Around her neck is a thin-chain pendant necklace with a diamond-crusted bubble-letter “B.”Before she was Hailey Bieber, she was Hailey Baldwin, the youngest daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin (himself the youngest of the four Baldwin brothers) and Kennya Baldwin, a Brazilian-born graphic designer, who raised their two girls in Nyack, New York. Nowadays, she primarily lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Justin Bieber, who is, at this moment, around the premises somewhere. (Over the course of their multiday Palm Heights stay, Justin does a good job of going unseen.)
In person, Hailey is friendly and grounded if also, understandably, guarded. Growing up in a quiet enclave an hour north of Manhattan, she was raised in the Christian faith and homeschooled beginning in eighth grade. She moved out at 17. “I couldn’t wait to just adult,” she says, sipping a lemonade. “I was young, eyes wide open, super independent, couldn’t wait to move out, couldn’t wait to make my own money.”
After high school, her world was an arcade. “You move into New York City and you’re out at Up & Down at 17,” she cracks, referring to the now-shuttered West Village nightclub. She racked up fashion campaigns and brand-endorsement deals while she and her friends, among them the Jenner and Hadid sisters, formed social media’s first wave of megawatt model-influencers.
