Three years after stepping back from modelling to confront a long battle with Lyme disease, Bella Hadid has returned on her own terms. In the past few weeks alone, she turned 30, opened the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show for the first time, and kept building the two companies she started from nothing. This is the story of how she got here — and where the next chapter takes her.
The Long Way Back
Hadid was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2012, alongside her mother Yolanda and brother Anwar, and has spoken for more than a decade about the anxiety and depression that came with it. In 2023, after what she has called years of invisible suffering, she stepped back from modelling almost entirely.
Speaking to Allure in 2024, she said that after a decade in the industry, she realized she had been pouring energy into something that, in the end, wasn’t giving it back to her. In a later interview with her sister Gigi for Vogue Italia, she described the fear of feeling replaceable every time she turned down a job, and the therapy that helped her separate her sense of self-worth from her bookings.
She has since relocated to Texas, where she lives with her partner, professional equestrian Adán Bañuelos, and has said she no longer performs for the camera: these days, if she doesn’t feel well, she simply doesn’t go.
Beauty Builds an Empire
Hadid’s business career began in 2021, when she co-founded Kin Euphorics with Jen Batchelor: a non-alcoholic beverage line built on adaptogens and nootropics, its name drawn from the Greek word for well-being.
In May 2024 she launched a second venture, Ôrəbella, a fragrance and haircare line built around rituals of scent, carrying the tagline “reveal your alchemy.” She first teased the brand, trademarked back in 2022, with four words on Instagram: “My passion. My baby.” It has since expanded into body mists, hair perfumes and skincare, stocked at Ulta and anchored in the same language of ritual and self-care that runs through the rest of her public story.
More Than a Model
Hadid’s return to the runway has been deliberate. Since 2024 she has walked for Saint Laurent, Valentino Haute Couture, Chanel Haute Couture, Christian Dior Haute Couture and Schiaparelli, and in February 2026 she made her long-awaited runway debut for Prada — a label she’d worn off-duty since 2017 — appearing in four distinct looks in a single show.
On October 18 she opened the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show for the first time, in beaded floral wings and a lime-green pareo, having walked the show three times before without ever leading it. Weeks earlier, she’d stepped into her first major acting role, playing a supermodel named Ruby in Ryan Murphy’s FX series The Beauty — a part she’s said she hopes will lead to more. “This is a dream of mine,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.
Between two growing companies, a renewed runway career and a new way of appearing in front of the camera, Hadid’s next chapter looks less like a comeback than a rebuild — on terms she set herself.
