Despite a Total Lack of Subtlety in Her Bath & Body Works Commercial, Hilary Duff Is Winning the “Millennial Spokesperson” Title in a Quieter Way Than Lindsay Lohan

On the heels of Lindsay Lohan releasing a Chime commercial that calls out younger millennials “officially turning thirty” (as she herself turned forty on July 2, 2026), a much different kind of commercial from another “millennial spokesperson” has dropped. One from Hilary Duff that opts not to talk of finances, but does, in its way, highlight figures. That is to say, her own. After all, it’s an ad for Bath & Body Works, the brand that speaks to millennials far more than Chime ever could. For, despite the brand being founded in 1963, the brand’s true renaissance reached an apex in the 2000s, right as Duff herself was rising to fame as Lizzie McGuire on the Disney show of the same name.

Indeed, Lohan and Duff got their Disney start around the same “moment in the culture,” with the former starring in a remake of The Parent Trap in 1998. McGuire was cast as Lizzie in 2000, with the show’s first season airing in January of ‘01. Thus, they were both unwittingly cast as rivals for becoming tween Disney “it” girls at the dawn of the twenty-first century. And, from the get-go, it was apparent that Duff was going to be painted as the “good girl,” what with her blonde hair and naturally “angelic” vibe. Lohan then easily took on the part of the “bad girl,” with her red or brown hair and, soon enough, her “club rat” persona that would begin to form in 2004, just as she became a household name with Mean Girls.

Meanwhile, the same year, Duff was continuing to star in wholesome fare like Cheaper by the Dozen (another Disney remake) and Raise Your Voice. As their trajectories continued to diverge, it probably became easier for the public to assume that Lohan was the “Jezebel” in that whole love triangle with Aaron Carter. Even though it was Carter himself who would openly declare as early as 2005 (on The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch), “I was actually dating [Hilary] for like a year and a half. And, um, then I just got a little bored so I went and I started getting to know Lindsay… Dating Lindsay.” He then said he got back with Hilary and promptly cheated on her with her best friend. And subsequently proceeded to spend most of the rest of his “career” referencing this “player era.”

An era that did the most damage to Duff and Lohan, who were painted in the tabloids as being in a perennial catfight. That sort of brainwashing even went to Duff’s head, who dredged up a little detail from 2003 on the February 25, 2026 episode of Call Her Daddy, during which Alex Cooper asked, point-blank, “Did you intentionally crash the Freaky Friday premiere?” Duff was candid enough to admit, “Um, I think absolutely yes. Yeah, I was a teenager.” “Wait, were you surprised when Lindsay Lohan showed up to the Cheaper by the Dozen premiere?” Without missing a beat, Duff returned, “No. No, I mean that was like my childhood feud—like, nemesis,” adding, “Also, like, Lindsay came up to me at a club once and was, like, ‘Are we good?’ And I was like, ‘We’re good.’ She was like, ‘Let’s take a shot.’ I was like, ‘Okay.’”

Because, in truth, it was yet another “heartthrob” du moment that also got that “premiere war” started, with Duff explaining, “But also, like, Chad Michael Murray invited me. Why? Why would he—I don’t wanna start any more stuff, but, like, he was like, ‘You should come with me.’ and I was like, ‘Mhm, probably I should.’” And the latest thing Duff thought she “probably should” do was this ad campaign—billed as “Summer just got a whole lot juicier with Hilary Duff”—for Bath & Body Works, which goes hand in hand with appealing to what falls under the oft-touted category of “millennial nostalgia.”

Something Lohan also tries to do in her Chime ad as she wears, ostensibly, the dowdiest green top (with some kind of “jewel” embellishments sewn onto it) she could find paired with, yes, something like “mom jeans.” The outfit presumably meant to make the viewer take her seriously as she prattles on about a lot of nothing in a way that’s supposed to make anyone trying to listen feel like “finances are easy.” In short, it’s the exact opposite of Duff saying more with less in her commercial, which finds her lip-syncing to Squeeze’s “Tempted” (save for an instant when she belts out her own vocal rendition of the line, “There’s no other”) as she sensually rubs and sprays products onto herself from the Fruit Fusion collection, a new array of products in scents that include Banana Blend, Berry Bliss, Tangerine Twirl and Watermelon Whirl. With each scent available as a body wash, a body cream, a perfume mist, a body lotion, a hand sanitizer, a lip oil and a hand cream. Thus, creating plenty of ways to “mix and match.”

As for Duff, her own preferred scent combo, per Bustle, is Tangerine Twirl and Banana Blend. Not that anyone watching her commercial would be able to decipher that nuance as she serves some extremely 2000s-era pandering to the male gaze. Complete with the white bra and underwear that’s been soaked by the Flashdance-esque water hailing down on her from some disembodied showerhead in the sky (surely, “Come Clean” is a vague reference here as well). This as the oh so suggestive tagline, “For fruity scents. Real juicy benefits” flashes over her wet body. In a certain sense, it has the same “subtlety” of Paris Hilton’s 2005 Carl’s Jr. commercial (for, like Hilton, Duff is also getting plenty “wet” [to the point where maybe Beyoncé’s “Morning Dew” ought to be playing] and biting sensually into a food item—in this case, an orange…even though it’s Tangerine Twirl that’s on offer as a scent).

So yes, Duff is very much the person they ought to have, er, tapped for this brand. For her “headspace,” despite all that post-2000s progress, is still clearly locked into that decade. For, as she also told Bustle, “There’s something about early 2000s beauty for me that was really about experimentation. And I feel like I’m circling back to that now in a different way.” Even if, based on this commercial, it’s more of the “same” way that was happening back then: hook the audience (men in particular) with a sexy blonde girl showing plenty of skin. That disgraced business “mogul” Les Wexner is the co-founder of this brand (and remains its “chair emeritus”) only adds to the 00s feel of the commercial in the skeeviest kind of way. Which means, maybe Lohan is the victor in this “ad war” between two women still vying to appeal to a particular generation. To assure that generation that they’re the best for the “millennial mascot”/“millennial spokesperson” job. Which ultimately means persuading millennials to buy some Fruit Fusion products with a Chime card. Not exactly as “aspirational” as either girl used to be…

So maybe neither of them are coming up as the “winner” here (just as neither of them really did with Carter…though that was, of course, a blessing in disguise). And yet, while Duff’s commercial is, in its way, actually subtler than Lohan dressed like a suburbanite in a craft store and surrounding herself with millennial ephemera while spouting mumbo-jumbo about financial savvy and responsibility, where she wins out is in appealing to millennials as they were, not telling them that they’re “old” now and need to learn about the value of money. When, of course, they would all still so much prefer to just blow their “wad” at Bath & Body Works.