Jaclyn Hill Doesn’t Care What You Think About Her — She Cares What You Think Of Her Cosmetics

Talking to beauty influencer Jaclyn Hill is like talking to a friend you’ve known forever. And, truly, many makeup lovers have "known" Hill longer than they’ve known some of their best friends. Hill’s bubbly, no B.S. personality has been a cornerstone of the online beauty space for several years. A glam face with hoop earrings and sweats. An expletive in every exclamation. A loving declaration of “BITTTTTCH” every time a beauty product exceeds expectation. That’s Jaclyn Hill, the best friend of every beauty lover who turns to YouTube for makeup advice or quirky entertainment.

Hill is currently preparing for the release of her new collection with budget-friendly makeup brand Morphe on June 26. The four palette collection includes shadows that were tabled after the release of her original 35-pan palette with the brand. Hill says about 25 of the shadows in the 40 pan collection were locked away after not making the cut for the original Jaclyn Hill x Morphe palette.

Update: On June 21, Morphe announced the release of Hill's Vault Collection would be delayed due to "inconsistent production" of the palettes. There is currently no new release date.

But the shades aren’t second-best in any way, and Hill will be the first one to tell you.

“A year ago when I launched the original palette, I loved so many of these shades so much — but we had to only pick 35,” Hill says during our phone call. “We had to have the palette make sense with enough matte shades, shimmer shades, transition shades, and highlight shades for all different skin tones. The rest of the shades weren’t “rejects;” they weren’t ones that we didn’t love just as much. I wanted to be able to put these in there.”

Now those shadows are getting their time in the spotlight. Hill and the Morphe team created four palettes of their favorite tabled shadows, each with a specific color story and definitive personality.

“I would say that the purple palette, which is Bling Bot, is definitely for like the girl or boy who wants to have fun,” Hill says. “You have a lot of awesome purples and like eggplants. It’s very fun, and it’s very poppy. Ring the Alarm, which is the red palette, is definitely the seductive, most sexy palette in the entire collection. Dark Magic, the green palette is definitely fall, nighttime, and sensual — like a date night. It just makes me think of an after-hours vibes. And then Armed and Gorgeous, which is the yellow one, is perfect for daytime and summer.”

There’s truly a palette for everyone — and every mood — in the collection. And while they’re all close to Hill’s heart, there’s one that sticks out to the makeup maven — the red Ring The Alarm palette.

“The Ring the Alarm palette is my go-to palette that I use every single day,” she says. “I’m already on my second one. I have hit pan on all of the colors of the first palette I started using several months ago.”

For any fan of Hill’s, this favoritism should come as no surprise. Hill’s YouTube channel is full of warm-toned, smoked-out looks that the Ring The Alarm palette seems made to recreate.

The most important is to stop caring what people think and to just allow yourself to truly be happy.

Aside from being known for her warm-hued eye looks, Hill is also known for being the envy of the entire makeup community when it comes to her foundation application. Her skin is like a porcelain doll, smooth and airbrushed in an almost unrealistic way. Yet, it is real. And Hill has no problem spilling her secret, which includes her unabashed obsession with Dior’s Diorskin Forever Perfect Foundation.

“It’s the prettiest foundation I have ever used in my entire life,” Hill says when describing her foundation routine. “It completely eliminates my pores. There’s this glowy face mist by lilah b. that I am obsessed with, too. I use it in every single video now. I damp my beauty sponge or foundation brush before I apply my foundation, and it just makes it go on so beautiful. I cannot live without those two products right now.”

These simple tips and high recommendations are what keeps Hill’s fans coming back for more. With more than 5 million subscribers on YouTube, her suggestions and favorites have the ability to take a product from a relatively unknown gem to a best-seller.

Aside for her work with Morphe and mid-range beauty brand BECCA, Hill has been teasing an eponymous makeup brand for some time now. Though there were promises for a summer 2018 release, Hill recently announced on Twitter that there had been some “major setbacks” to the launch. And now she’s ready to share a little more about those hurdles, including the almost unimaginable pressure to launch a solo brand as one of the world’s top beauty influencers.

“One of the reasons Jaclyn Hill Cosmetics has not launched yet is because I became aware earlier in the year of how high the demand is for it, and it really cause a lot of pressure for me,” Hill says. “Along with my personal life, I have just been so stressed out. It just wasn’t the time for me to be launching a brand right now and taking on that huge responsibility.

“I’m just really trying to focus on it and make it absolutely incredible so that when it does launch, it’s what everyone is expecting and there are no disappointments whatsoever.”

I’ve cared so much about what people think and about my image — and it’s just not worth it.

For Hill, living up to extremely high expectations has dictated much of her professional life. With every video, every Instagram post, and every collaboration comes a pressure to be the Jaclyn Hill fans expect. This year, that professional pressure collided with her personal life when Hill went through a very public separation with her ex-husband. In her video announcing the separation, Hill pointed to the pressure to put on a happy face professionally while things were falling apart personally — and how it eventually got to be too much for her to handle.

In the process of sorting out her personal life, Hill moved away from the public eye — and fans noticed. But now, Hill is slowly starting to become more public again. And she’s bringing a new outlook with her after a life-altering year.

“Out of everything I’ve learned in this past year, the most important is to stop caring what people think and to just allow yourself to truly be happy,” Hill says. “I’ve cared so much about what people think and about my image — and it’s just not worth it.”

This new philosophy means that fans can look forward to a carefree Hill with a bold authenticity that is beyond admiral. Just don’t call it a comeback, because Jaclyn Hill was never gone.

While coming out of the shadows in the past month to launch her Morphe vault, every single question fans have had about Hill’s professional and personal life have now been answered, including even the most intimate and emotional questions we don’t entirely deserve the answers to.

There’s very little one can ask of Hill now, except for the most exciting question of all: What’s next? But Hill is keeping this one to herself.

“I don’t want to give anything away,” Hill says. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”