How Bella Hadid Became Beauty’s Breakout Face of the Moment

Bella Hadid is in demand with designers and ablaze on social media. Her next model milestone? A brand-new beauty contract.

Bella Hadid arrives on set casually dressed in jeans and a cropped sweater, a swath of midsection exposed to the summer weather. With curves so astonishing that one’s eyes tend to linger slightly longer than is comfortable in order to process what they are seeing, Hadid is hard to miss. In New York for only a few days, the nineteen-year-old has just flown in from Paris, where the couture season cemented her as one of the biggest models working today. Handpicked—along with such catwalk veterans as Karen Elson and Carolyn Murphy—for Atelier Versace, Hadid also closed Fendi’s Haute Fourrure Trevi Fountain extravaganza in Rome. As the last model Karl Lagerfeld sent down a runway that was elevated above the restored Baroque landmark’s pools, Hadid appeared to be literally walking on water. “It was such a surreal moment,” she said afterward.

Hadid has had a lot of these moments recently—the latest, scoring her first beauty contract with Christian Dior. Her trajectory is familiar in a fashion landscape where a famous family and an army of online followers (she has 5.4 million and counting on Instagram) have helped spark more than one meteoric rise. Just look at her older sister, the gorgeous Gigi Hadid, whose all-American appeal has earned her countless campaigns since she exploded onto the scene.

But there’s something different about Bella. She has a dark, mysterious edge that goes beyond bombshell, thanks in part to rich chestnut strands that make her aquamarine eyes pop (and which she admits to dyeing as a means of differentiating herself from her towheaded sister). That same allure has made her a fixture on Riccardo Tisci’s personal social-media platforms, where she often stars in photos captioned with #gang, a hashtag of endearment the Givenchy artistic director typically reserves for an inner circle that includes Beyoncé. And Madonna.

“Bella came along and charmed everybody,” reveals Dior’s Creative & Image Director Peter Philips, who adds that Hadid also has a face that is seemingly tailor-made for makeup; her cheekbones alone are begging for a slick of Philips’s new Diorblush Light & Contour jumbo sticks. But it’s Hadid’s ability to transition seamlessly from backstage to red carpet and every Snapchat in between that aligns her with the French house’s ever-evolving genetic code, insists Philips. This June, the model and the makeup artist debuted the first installment of a collaborative ten-part Web series on Dior.com. Each episode is meant as much as a compelling document of Hadid’s jet-set life—lounging poolside at Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, or on the arm of her musician boyfriend, Abel Tesfaye (a.k.a. The Weeknd)—as a clever behind-the-scenes look at how she’s using Philips’s products.

There’s a glitter-inflected gloss from one of Philips’s forthcoming collections that has caught Hadid’s attention today as he preps her subtly freckled, incandescent skin for the first shot of the morning. “I need this,” she coos, offering her stamp of approval—which means a lot coming from Hadid; her well-documented adventures in high-shine lips and elongated cat eyes have coalesced into a growing playbook for beauty enthusiasts the world over. Considering she discovered makeup fairly late in the game—“We weren’t allowed to wear it when we were younger,” she explains—there’s a slight irony in the influence Hadid now commands. But she’s a quick study, a steady hand, and with the appropriate tools now at her fingertips, she’s just the right poster girl for beauty’s fearless DIY generation.

 

Fashion Editor: Celestine Cooney
Hair: Akki; Makeup: Peter Philips for Christian Dior

 

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Bella Hadid’s jet-lag beauty survival guide:

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