Rihanna, Fenty Beauty and the Founder as the Advertisement

Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty, named for her own surname, Fenty, in 2017, as a fifty-fifty venture with the French luxury group LVMH.^[1] Its foundation arrived in forty shades, and the launch is now routinely described as the moment the industry's shade ranges changed.

That description is worth examining, and the number alone was not unprecedented.^[2] What Fenty proved was a business model, and in the 2020s much of the industry set out to copy it.

A 2018 analysis of published shade values put the count in proportion. Make Up For Ever had been selling forty shades of its Ultra HD foundation since 2015, but thirty-one of them fell in a single band of light and tanned skin. Fenty's range was spread far more evenly, strong at both the darkest and the lightest ends, though the same analysis found that very few brands, Fenty not among them, reached the very darkest band at all.^[3]

The achievement, in other words, was distribution rather than number: a range built as though customers at both ends of it were expected to turn up.

The clearest demonstration came during the Super Bowl LVII halftime show on 12 February 2023. In the middle of her set Rihanna stopped to check her make-up and touched up her face with a Fenty Beauty compact, the Invisimatte Instant Setting + Blotting Powder, in front of one of the largest television audiences of the year.^[4]

Nothing about the moment was hidden, and that was its power. A celebrity-owned brand needs no endorsement deal, because every appearance its founder makes is already an advertisement, and a touch-up on the biggest stage in American television was simply the model at full scale.

By 2023 Forbes estimated her net worth at 1.4 billion dollars, and it was the beauty business rather than music that had carried it there: in one reporter's words, music made her famous, but it was the Fenty line that took her wealth into the stratosphere. Fenty Beauty had sold more than 550 million dollars' worth of products in 2020 alone.^[5]

A performer made richer by her make-up company than by her records is the plainest statement of how the business had changed. The celebrity brand was no longer a licence to put a famous name on somebody else's product. It was an equity stake in a company the famous person was seen to run.

How much the forty-shade launch changed what other companies made, as opposed to what they said. A shade count is a published number, not a sales figure, and the analysis cited here calls its own measurements a rough proxy for inclusivity.^[6]