Justin Bieber Shares Crying Photo on Instagram

By Olivia Craighead, a news writer for the Cut who covers pop culture and celebrity.  Previously, she wrote about pop culture and entertainment at Gawker.

Over the weekend, much ado was made about Justin Bieber crying on Instagram. The singer included a photo of himself with a tear streaming down his face in a photo dump, causing fans and news outlets to speculate that something was wrong. Hailey Bieber swooped into the comments, seemingly to assuage fans’ concern.

“A pretty crier,” Hailey commented on the post. A few reports mentioned the ever-present rumor that their marriage was in trouble, so she nipped that in the bud. Missing from a lot of the coverage around Justin crying was the fact that he was doing a lot of posting when he shared the crying photo. Here’s another photo dump from the same spree:

In these photos, he’s doing a lot of smiling (and staring out into the ocean), so maybe he’s also feeling all right? You can never really tell with Bieber. Perhaps he included a crying photo in a Sad Hot Girl kind of way. If I had to read into it, I would point out that the photo dump also includes several shots of him on his last big tour, the Justice World Tour. The tour was canceled in 2022 after Bieber was diagnosed with Ramsay Hunt syndrome, leaving half of his face paralyzed.

My guess is that he was scrolling through his camera roll, found the old photos, started crying, and took a photo. That being said, the dump also includes a blurry close-up of what looks like weed in a bong, Toronto Maple Leafs player Auston Matthews, and a rendering (?) of a secluded bungalow in the middle of the jungle. I don’t know that anyone is capable of divining what all of that means other than Bieber himself.