Celebrities Need to Stop Using Their Makeup Lines to Fight Each Other, It’s Killing the Fun

Photo: Tyrell Hampton/Instagram, @jordynnwoods/Snapchat, kyliecosmetics.com

Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes I miss the good old days — especially the good old days of celebrity feuds. I remember where I was sitting – I was sitting in my junior year biology class, I remember – when I was reading the tweets: “Remember when you had a life and stopped making bitchy comments about mine?” Zayn Malik, who recently departed from One Direction, tweeted former bandmate Louis Tomlinson. Malik responded to Tomlinson’s comment on a photo of Malik and his new collaborator Naughty Boy: “Remember when you were 12 and thought those Mac filters for your pics were cool haha! Some people still do HA!” Tomlinson wrote.

2015 may have been the peak of celebrity beef around the same time as that Amanda Bynes tweeted every hour about her not-so-kind thoughts on Drake’s looks. And I’ll say it: I miss those days! We just don’t get to face celebrity food fights like this anymore, and honestly I blame every celebrity, micro-celebrity and their damn cousin for the demise of this lost art having a skincare or beauty line to promote these days. This has made makeup advertising the new metric frontier for all celebrity feuds, instead of just going to Twitter dot com like we saw it in the 2010s.

Case in point: This week’s Jordyn Woods – the Instagram model and designer best known for it Kylie Jenner’s ex-BFF– briefly broke the internet because of a Snapchat story Promoting Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty lip products. Let me explain: For the past few weeks, Jenner has been the center of attention reignited (allegedly!) feud between Gomez and Hailey Bieberwho has been married to Gomez’s longtime ex Justin Bieber since 2018.

rumors of Conflict between Gomez and Hailey For years, fans have swirled the theory that Justin Gomez cheated with Hailey, and recent events have only fueled those speculations — namely, a few shady Instagram Stories Jenner shared this of her and Hailey, who didn’t seem to subtly poke fun at Gomez’s eyebrows last week. In any case, Woods seems to have taken a side in promoting Rare Beauty during the Cold War between Selena and Hailey. And concurrently with Wood’s post on Monday, Bieber was promoting products from her own skincare line while the hit song “Calm Down” played in the background — specifically the version of the track that does not include the function of Gomez.

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In fact, snarky product placement and comments have recently become the weapon of choice for Gomez, Hailey, Jenner, and a handful of other influencers-turned-beauty moguls: Last May, Justine Skye, one of Hailey’s best friends, posted a Snapchat story of herself and Hailey, followed by another who appeared to be very aggressively shadowing Gomez and Rare Beauty: “Doing TikToks every day like you don’t have a crappy makeup brand running? (Gomez had become noticeably very active on TikTok at the time.) Immediately thereafter, Skye deleted the stories and fired a series of tweets accused Gomez fans of hacking their Snapchat.

And in 2019, shortly after Woods admitted to kissing Tristan Thompson while he was dating Jenner’s sister Khloe Kardashian, Jenner notoriously harshly ushered in the end of their friendship by changing the makeup collection she shared with Woods shared, set up on sale at half price. Shot.

Kylie Cosmetics sold a makeup collab with Jordyn Woods at half price after Woods and Jenner fell out in 2019. Screenshot: kyliecosmetics.com

Sure, shadow-casting by digging into each other’s makeup products creates chaos and drama—an intoxicating opiate for the masses, briefly distracting us, the peasant class, from what the Jenner clan is like with their wealth-accumulating methods destruction of the planet. But I still miss it when hot, exorbitantly wealthy folks weren’t afraid to just throw a metaphorical punch or two. There’s something utterly soul-sucking about how an event in nature as pure as the celebrity feud can be commodified so transparently at this point in late capitalism, with the raw emotion and instinctive anger that a screaming Twitter Driving Match in the 2010s that trades in carefully curated aesthetics and product placement.

A good celebrity fight used to be free feel-good content just for the enjoyment of us humans — now it’s chopped to pieces, reduced to a cold and distant science, a commercialized cash heist for celebs to try and sell us their shit.

All of this is to say, if Hailey and Selena loathe each other as much as they seem, then one of them just has to have a go! Please God, anything but another shady ad for Rhode Skin or Rare Beauty.