Despite the freezing cold in New York, Hailey Bieber starts our Zoom by complimenting me on my glowing skin. Little does she know, it’s thanks to one of her products, Rhode’s Barrier Butter (along with some U Beauty face oil). It was one of Rhode’s last launches of last year, and to kick off 2025, she’s already on to the next launch: a lip “contouring” (but don’t call it a lip liner) product called the Peptide Lip Shape.
Bieber has been teasing the lip product (as she usually does) on social media, and her TikTok comments are filled with those of Rhode fans such influencer Chloe Bean commenting, “I will never recover if you bring our lip liner.” Other fans said things like, “Girl, don’t keep us waiting; drop them lip liners.” Bieber knows her fans are waiting. “I do it for the girls,” she tells me after giving me a rundown of the new lip liners. If you think Rhode is launching lip liners like any of your favorite liners you currently have in your bag, think again. Peptide Lip Shape isn’t even really considered a liner. “The concept of this whole product is that it’s not meant to be a lip liner, it’s actually meant to be a lip contour,” she said. “ The way you use a contour for the face, I wanted to take that same concept and bring it to the lip area.” (And, of course, it’s made to be worn with Rhode’s cult favorite Peptide Lip Treatment.)
It comes in 11 shades, from neutral pinks and soft beiges to rich, neutral browns and deep, cool browns. She wanted shades that would be a contour shade for all lip colors and would complement natural lip tones. It’s a creamy formula with a built-in smudger that allows you to diffuse the product on your lips. “It’s like a flat silicone smudger with edges. The edges you can use to clean up where you want to,” Bieber says. The formula is a blend of peptides, a signature Rhode ingredient (Bieber is a peptide obsessive throughout her personal skin and wellness routine) and fenugreek extract, an ingredient that visibly enhances the appearance of the volume of the lips. The product is priced at $24 (the same price as the popular Make Up For Ever liner but more expensive than Ami Colé’s) and launches on January 30 on rhodeskin.com. It can be purchased separately or as a collection of four shades (which you can choose from).
Here, Bieber tells us more about what we can expect from Peptide Lip Shape, her first memories of wearing excessive lip liner and makeup growing up as a ballet dancer, and more, including her 2025 wellness resolutions (spoiler alert: it includes trying new things like the popular salmon DNA facial).
The girls have been waiting for a lip liner from you, Hailey. What are your first personal memories of lip liner? Who did you see it on? Who was your inspiration?
You know what’s funny? For me, the way that lip liner was ever really incorporated into my life as a young girl or a young teenager was as a ballet dancer. Stage makeup was really where lip liner came into the fold for me, but it’s the complete opposite of my day-to-day vibe. Stage makeup is very intense: It’s full strip lashes; it’s crazy amounts of definition and contour because it’s just a whole other kind of a vibe and you’re wearing a deep-red lip with a crazy lip liner. Over the last couple of years, lip liner being part of my day-to-day lip combo, that was something that I think I started exploring more as I explored with makeup and with makeup artists and saw how they did things.
Tell me about the formula, especially your decision to include peptides, an ingredient you find in skin care but not in a traditional lip liner.
I’m a big advocate of peptides and skin care, in your wellness routine. I love collagen powder with peptides. I’m a big peptide girl and when we were creating Rhode and we started conceptualizing the products, peptides were the biggest thing I said that I felt I saw the most significant difference ever in my skin from using them. Especially when it comes to the lips, the benefit that you can get from applying peptides is that you can get natural plumpness over time and more smoothness on your lines.
What I like about this product is that you can play outside the lines when you’re contouring the lips or the mouth. It’s not about precision, that’s what precise lip liners are for, and this is not that. This is meant to be the thing where it’s like if you’re in the back of a car and it’s shaking, you could still get away with getting this on and it not look crazy, because it’s a contour.
I need to hear your favorite go-to combos.
I’m going to give you three combos: I really like the shade Press, because it does really complement my natural lip — I have a pinkier lip tone, which looks like just more of my natural lip tone — that I’ll do with just a clear lip treatment over it or a clear gloss, whatever it may be.
Then for the more contour shades, I like Balance and Twist. Those I like to contour around the mouth, I overdo it around the Cupid’s bow, and I kind of follow my natural lip shape and expand upon that. I go in with the smudger, then I’ll put Pocket Blush, the Piggy one, on as the center of the lips. It’s kind of like a little bit of a darker contour with the pink in the center of the lip, which I think is really beautiful. I’ve been doing that the most.
I like the shade Stretch, which on me is more of a brown and I like to combine that with the Espresso lip tint for a brown ’90s look.
The shade names are all so movement-adjacent and they fit the Rhode marketing so well, what’s the significance of the names? How are you thinking about marketing each product?
When I thought about the name of the Peptide Lip Shape, I was like: I really like this concept of shaping the same way that contour shapes your face. When I think of shape, I think of it in life; how do we keep ourselves in shape and how do we keep our body in shape? It’s through movement, whatever that is to you. I’m somebody who is very big on wellness and fitness and all of that stuff: Pressing, lunging, lifting, twisting, moving, whether it’s dancing, whether it’s squatting or lifting, it’s just really the concept of shape and movement.
How long do they last?
It was very important to me that it had staying power and because it’s not a traditional liner and it’s creamy like a contour, it does have the staying power of a liner. I know that even if I’m wearing the most non-budging lip liner, I do find that I’m always reapplying at some point in the night because I eat food, I talk. But this is the most seamless and easy thing to reapply throughout the night because it’s so creamy and feels good on the lips. The same way you constantly reapply a gloss or a lip treatment, you’ll want to reapply it. What I wanted to take away from this is that you don’t need the precision of a lip liner.
Before application of anything, let’s say you wake up with the absolute driest lips. What’s your regimen for adding moisture back to them?
I have a hack that I’ve done for a long time. I feel like in the colder weather, like I was just in Canada for Christmas, it was very cold there and I’m from New York, so I know [how dry they can get]. I like to take something like Avène Cicalfate, which is really rich, almost like a cold cream. Put a layer of that on my lips at night before going to bed. I put a layer of that on my lips and let it sit, soak, and do its thing. Then, I put a super-thick layer of lip treatment over it. I’d put ours just over top of that, so it’s like slugging the lips. Or something really occlusive, like Vaseline, Aquaphor, or whatever is the thing that you like to put on your lips at night. Sleep with it overnight; ideally, you want something that lasts on the lips overnight, like a lip mask. Then in the morning, when you brush your teeth, you take a little towel or a rag and just put it under hot water, warm water, and slowly buff the lips. It works for me because the thing about [Cicalfate] is that it’s meant to heal chapped and cracked skin and has that thermal water in it. That product will be in my cabinet for the rest of my life. I can never find a replacement for that one.
The thermal water is so healing. You’ve got all the hacks, definitely trying. Entering this new year, what are your 2025 wellness resolutions?
My beauty resolution is that I want to try more things. I am open to trying more of the treatments. I recently tried microneedling with salmon DNA.
Oh my God, you did it? What did you think?
The glow is undeniable. I am open to trying those things because I’ve always been a big fan of PRP and microneedling. The concept of a PRP is amazing; it comes from your body. But I was open to trying a new wave of that. So there I was … trying a new wave of the salmon DNA microneedling. It’s great.