Selena Gomez, Rare Beauty and the Billion on Paper

Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty in September 2020, in the first year of the pandemic, with a promise attached: one per cent of all its sales would go to the Rare Impact Fund, which aims to raise a hundred million dollars for youth mental health.^[1]

Four years later a make-up company had, by one estimate, made its founder a billionaire.^[2]

The product that carried the company was a liquid blush. By the figures reported when Bloomberg added Gomez to its billionaires index, the blush alone sold seventy million dollars' worth in 2023.^[3]

A single inexpensive item selling at that scale is a social-media phenomenon as much as a cosmetic one: a product demonstrated and re-demonstrated by its own customers, in short videos, until it becomes the thing to buy. The founder's name opens the door. The customers' videos do the selling.

Rare Beauty's distinguishing claim is not a formula. It is a cause built into the company: the Rare Impact Fund, supported by one per cent of all sales, whose stated purpose is raising awareness of youth mental health and directing money to under-funded organisations serving young people.^[4] By September 2024 it had raised more than sixteen million dollars towards its goal.^[5]

A cause does commercial work, and saying so is not cynicism. It gives a customer a reason to choose one blush over another that has nothing to do with the blush, and it lets the purchase stand for something beyond itself.

On 6 September 2024 Bloomberg put Gomez on its billionaires index with an estimated fortune of 1.3 billion dollars, attributing about eighty-one per cent of it to her stake in Rare Beauty; her tours and record sales accounted for small fractions.^[6]

The figure is an estimate of the value of a private company, and a private company publishes no audited accounts to test it against.^[6] A fortune made in make-up is, in this case, a fortune on paper until somebody buys the company.

Rare Beauty follows the pattern Fenty Beauty had set three years earlier: a famous founder, a range launched with an argument attached, and a company in which the founder owns a stake rather than lending a name, a stake that on Bloomberg's figures was worth far more than her music.^[7]

What changed was the argument. Fenty's was inclusion, and it could be counted in shades. Rare Beauty's was a cause, counted as a share of sales, and it asked customers to judge the company partly by what it gave away. Both arguments do the same commercial work. They give a buyer a reason to prefer one product to another that is not about the product.

What the company is worth, until it is sold or floated, and how much of its success belongs to the products rather than to the name. The second question hangs over every celebrity brand of the decade, and none of them can answer it from the outside.