Hailey Bieber Education: The Real Story Behind Why She Never Finished High School

The fact that Hailey Bieber, one of the most prosperous women in the beauty industry today and the creator of a skincare line that recently sold for a billion dollars, never completed high school is particularly ironic. Not abruptly stopped, not thrown off course by a crisis worthy of the news. She simply became lazy and stopped showing up, as she has explained herself. On paper, it sounds extraordinary, but the explanation is remarkably ordinary.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, in November 1996, Hailey Rhode Baldwin was raised in a home influenced by performance, faith, and a well-known last name. Her mother Kennya is a Brazilian graphic designer whose father, Eumir Deodato, is a well-known musician, and her father is actor Stephen Baldwin, the youngest of the Baldwin brothers. The conventional school-to-college pipeline was probably never the obvious choice for someone growing up in that orbit—creative, somewhat unconventional, deeply religious.

By most accounts, her seventh-grade education at Eastern Christian Middle School was fairly typical. Her parents then gave her a choice between homeschooling and attending a Christian school, which she remembers with a mix of amusement and mild frustration. There was no discussion of public education. She also didn’t seem to be interested in attending a performing arts school in New York City. She stayed at home as a result. When presented with the choice to skip the commute to a school that seemed distant and uninteresting, she made the sensible teenage decision. She remained at home.

In her case, ballet fills the void left by formal education. It began early and lasted for twelve years, nearly coinciding with her whole childhood and adolescence. According to her, the American Ballet Theatre School, where she trained, was the hub of her social life. There, she made friends, developed self-discipline, and acquired a creative and physical vocabulary that would influence everything that followed. She might have benefited more from those hours at the barre than from anything she could have learned in a traditional classroom, such as how to hold a line and endure discomfort.

A foot injury put an end to the ballet dream. Her discovery as a model coincided with her age of sixteen. The timing seems more like a fork in the road she was constantly approaching than a coincidence. Almost instantly, one door closed and another opened, as seems to happen to people with her unique blend of ambition, connections, and appearance. Before the majority of her peers had taken the SAT, she signed with Ford Models and started making appearances in editorials and campaigns.

Hailey seems to have spent years managing her emotions regarding the schooling she was unable to complete. She has been open about it in interviews, most notably telling WSJ Style that she regrets not finishing high school and that she just let it go in order to pursue her modeling career. She doesn’t act overly guilty about it, but she also doesn’t brush it off. The regret is real, if not crippling. It’s the regret of someone who is aware of what she missed in terms of social and developmental aspects rather than just credentials.

She has openly discussed the effects of homeschooling. In an interview with Dixie D’Amelio in 2021, she discussed how she missed out on the typical mixed-gender social setting of high school, where boys and girls are casually close to each other every day as they figure out how to coexist. She quickly joked that, considering who she married, she appears to have managed that specific gap. However, the observation was accurate. Even though ballet classes offered some community, homeschooling left some experiences out of her development. Just missing, not damaged.

It’s difficult to ignore how her journey reflects a more general change in what success truly demands. Regardless of what followed, dropping out of high school carried a stigma a generation ago that was hard to overcome. The lack of a diploma begins to seem less like a deficiency and more like an irrelevance when one observes someone like Hailey Bieber build Rhode from the ground up, creating a product line, managing a brand identity, and growing it to $212 million in annual sales before selling to e.l.f. cosmetics for a nine-figure sum. For educators, that’s not a comfortable conclusion, and it probably shouldn’t be the case for everyone. However, it’s difficult to dispute the result in her particular situation.

Living in the fashion and beauty industries from adolescence onward taught her things like product intuition, brand aesthetics, and the patience to build something slowly and on her own terms. She learned what aspirational branding looks like from the inside through campaigns for Guess, Ralph Lauren, and Tommy Hilfiger. She developed a discipline and attention to physical detail from her twelve years of ballet, which is important when creating skincare products. It’s still unclear if she would consider any of this to be formal education, but it served that purpose.

What she constructed with Rhode indicates that she took in important information. After launching in 2022, the brand produced the kind of numbers that attracted the attention of investors and beauty conglomerates in just three years. Hailey Bieber didn’t require a transcript when e.l.f. called with a billion-dollar offer. Taste, timing, and a keen understanding of what people want before they realize it were exactly what she needed. It worked whether she learned that from ballet, modeling, her family, or simply paying attention over years of being in the room. As it happens, the diploma was optional.