Rare Beauty
Selena Gomez's beauty brand, valued at ~$2.7 billion. Majority-owned, independently built, no conglomerate behind it.
Most celebrity beauty brands are assembled in a few months by a manufacturer who handles everything while the famous person shows up for a photo shoot and collects a check. Rare Beauty took two years to develop before it sold a single product, and the person running the company was not Selena Gomez but Scott Friedman, the former CEO of NYX Cosmetics, who had already built one beauty company from a small brand into a $500 million acquisition by L’Oréal. The team he brought with him had done this before, and they built Rare Beauty the same way they built NYX: with real operators, real product development, and a founder who was willing to do the work rather than license her name to someone else.
The result is a company that crossed $400 million in annual revenue by its fourth year, without a luxury conglomerate behind it, without traditional advertising, and with a single $23 blush that somehow accounts for more than a quarter of all blush sales at Sephora. As of late 2025, Rare Beauty is valued at approximately $2.7 billion, and Gomez holds a majority ownership stake that makes her one of the richest self-made women under 35 in the world.
Roughly 81% of her estimated $1.3 billion net worth comes from Rare Beauty, which means that her music career, her acting career, and her status as the third most-followed person on the entire internet are all financially secondary to a beauty company she owns.
At a glance:
| Founded | September 2020 |
| Founder | Selena Gomez |
| CEO | Scott Friedman (former CEO, NYX Cosmetics) |
| Ownership | Majority held by Gomez (~51%) |
| Annual revenue (2024) | $400–500M+ (estimated) |
| Valuation | ~$2.7B (estimated, 2025) |
| Available in | 36+ countries |
| Retailers | Sephora (global), Ulta Beauty (US), rarebeauty.com |
The Story
Gomez announced Rare Beauty in February 2020, seven months before its launch, and the announcement revealed something unusual about the brand’s intentions. The name came from her third studio album, but the company had nothing to do with music and everything to do with a set of personal experiences that most celebrity founders would never talk about publicly, let alone build an entire business around.
Gomez was diagnosed with lupus in 2015 and underwent a kidney transplant in 2017, and she has publicly disclosed diagnoses of anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. These are not biographical footnotes added to the brand’s About page for credibility, because they are the reason the brand exists, and they shaped the product design in ways that most customers do not initially notice.
Every piece of Rare Beauty packaging was developed in partnership with the Casa Colina Research Institute and a team of hand therapists. The bottles feature matte finishes for a firmer grip, low-resistance caps, easy-to-remove applicators, and lipstick tubes that can be opened with one hand. Gomez has lupus, which causes muscle weakness and hand tremors, and she wanted to build products that someone with her condition could actually use without frustration. The result is packaging that works better for everyone, designed by someone who understood from personal experience what the beauty industry had been getting wrong about accessibility for decades.
The team she assembled tells the rest of the story. Scott Friedman had built NYX Cosmetics from a discount beauty brand into a company that L’Oréal acquired for $500 million in 2014, and he signed on as CEO with a mandate to build something real rather than something fast. Joyce Kim and Mehdi Mehdi, both NYX veterans, took senior roles overseeing brand strategy and digital operations. This was the team behind one of the most successful indie beauty exits of the previous decade, and they were building a new company from scratch with a celebrity who was willing to spend two years on product development before launching a single item.
The Strategy
Mental health as a business model
Most celebrity beauty brands have a stated mission that exists on the website and nowhere else in the company’s operations. Rare Beauty’s is structural: 1% of all sales go to the Rare Impact Fund, built into the financial model on launch day rather than added once the brand could afford generosity. The fund’s goal is $100 million over ten years for mental health services in underserved communities, and as of 2025 it has raised over $20 million across roughly 30 organizations on five continents.
What makes this work as a business strategy is that Gen Z consumers, who drive the majority of Rare Beauty’s sales, rank mental health as their top concern in survey after survey, and they can tell the difference between a brand that talks about mental health in its ads and a brand built by a founder who has been hospitalized for hers. That authenticity cannot be replicated by a competitor with a similar message, because it requires a founder who has actually lived through the thing the brand is talking about.
The product that took over TikTok
The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush, a $23 product from the original launch lineup, started appearing in organic TikTok videos where creators demonstrated how a tiny dot bloomed into a full flush of color. The visual was inherently shareable, and by 2022 the hashtag #rarebeautyblush had accumulated over 417 million views.
That single product generated $70 million in revenue in 2023, with over 3 million units sold, and it now accounts for more than 26% of all blush sales at Sephora. Some locations began keeping it behind the counter because demand and theft had become unmanageable, which itself became a viral talking point that drove even more attention to the brand.
The broader marketing follows the same principle: Gomez posts casual tutorials without a makeup team, the brand partners with small creators instead of buying traditional ads, and the aesthetic emphasizes relatability over aspiration. No paid campaign created the TikTok phenomenon. The product did.
The Ulta expansion
For its first five and a half years, Rare Beauty sold exclusively through Sephora and its own website. In February 2026, the brand launched at all 1,500+ Ulta Beauty stores and broke Ulta’s all-time record for launch-day sales.
Before the launch, Rare Beauty had already become the most-searched cosmetics brand on Ulta’s website in 2025, despite not being available there. The demand existed before the distribution did, which gave the brand significant leverage in negotiating terms and ensured the launch would perform from its first hour.
The Numbers
| Year | Estimated Revenue | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 (Sep–Dec only) | Not disclosed | Pandemic launch, partial year |
| 2021 | Not disclosed | Baseline year |
| 2022 | ~$100M+ | Revenue doubled year-over-year |
| 2023 | ~$300–350M | Approximately 200% growth over 2022 |
| 2024 | $400–500M+ | $400M+ confirmed for 12 months ending ~May 2024 |
All revenue figures are estimates, because Rare Beauty is a private company that does not file public financial statements. The most credible figure comes from Business of Fashion, which reported that net sales crossed $400 million in the twelve months ending approximately May 2024.
The growth trajectory is what makes this case study unusual. Rare Beauty roughly tripled its revenue between 2022 and 2024, and it did so without the infrastructure of a luxury conglomerate behind it. Fenty Beauty reached $570 million in its first full year, but Fenty had LVMH’s global distribution network, Kendo Brands’ manufacturing expertise, and a simultaneous 17-country launch on day one. Rare Beauty reached comparable annual revenue as an independent company selling primarily through a single retail partner, which is a fundamentally different achievement even if the headline numbers look similar.
Gomez’s personal stake: Bloomberg reported in September 2024 that Gomez is a billionaire with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, roughly 81% of which comes from her Rare Beauty ownership stake. Forbes disputes this figure and estimates her net worth at closer to $700 million. The gap between those two numbers comes entirely from how you value a private, celebrity-linked beauty brand, which is the kind of question that has no clean answer until someone actually writes a check.
The sale that didn’t happen: In March 2024, Rare Beauty hired Goldman Sachs and Raymond James to explore a potential sale or IPO at a target valuation of $2 billion. By September 2024, the process had stalled because no buyer was willing to meet that price. The concern from potential acquirers was the same fear that haunts every celebrity brand: what happens to the business if the celebrity loses interest, and what is a company actually worth when its most valuable asset is a single person who could walk away? That question remains unanswered, and the brand’s estimated valuation rising to $2.7 billion by October 2025 suggests the market believes the answer is favorable, but nobody has committed real money to that belief yet.
Controversies
Israel-Gaza boycott
In November 2023, pro-Palestinian social media users called for a boycott of Rare Beauty after screenshots surfaced showing that CEO Scott Friedman followed pro-Israel accounts on Instagram, including the IDF, AIPAC, and Jewish Resistance. Rare Beauty responded by announcing donations to both Magen David Adom in Israel and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Gaza through the International Red Cross. The response backfired because Magen David Adom functions as an auxiliary to the Israeli Defense Forces in wartime, and activists accused the brand of framing a donation to an Israeli military-adjacent organization as humanitarian aid. Rare Beauty remains on boycott lists in Malaysia and several other countries.
What You Can Learn
Rare Beauty is approaching half a billion dollars in annual revenue with venture-level growth and no conglomerate backing. The principles behind that performance apply at scales much smaller than Selena Gomez’s.
A real mission creates a real moat. Most brands treat their mission statement as marketing copy that exists on a single page of their website. Rare Beauty embedded its mission into the financial model by committing 1% of all sales from day one and into the product design by developing accessible packaging with medical professionals. The result is a brand identity that competitors cannot replicate by launching a similar product with a similar message, because the identity is not about the product at all. If your business is built around a problem you genuinely understand because you have lived it, that understanding becomes a competitive advantage that no one with a bigger budget can buy their way into.
Build something worth talking about, then let people talk about it. The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush did not go viral because of a paid TikTok campaign or an influencer strategy. It went viral because the product itself was visually interesting enough that creators discovered it organically and wanted to show it to their audiences. The most expensive marketing in the world cannot buy the kind of credibility that comes from real people choosing to talk about your product because they genuinely like using it, and building something worth that kind of organic conversation is more valuable than paying for attention around something mediocre.
You do not need a conglomerate. Fenty Beauty had LVMH and Kendo Brands. Kylie Cosmetics had Seed Beauty and later Coty. Rare Beauty was built by a small team of experienced operators and a celebrity founder who spent two years on development before selling anything. The NYX playbook of building quality products, hiring people who have done it before, and growing through genuine community rather than paid advertising works without a $500 billion luxury conglomerate providing the infrastructure, and the same principle applies to most online businesses at any scale.
Hire people who have already done what you are trying to do. Gomez did not try to learn the beauty industry from scratch, because she recognized that her value was not operational expertise but rather her audience, her story, and her willingness to be publicly vulnerable about mental health. She hired Scott Friedman, who had already built and sold a beauty company for $500 million, and surrounded him with the team that made NYX successful. The pattern is identical to what Rihanna did with Kendo: find the best operators in the industry and focus on what you bring that they cannot replicate.
Demand before distribution. Rare Beauty became the most-searched cosmetics brand on Ulta’s website before it was even available at Ulta, and the resulting launch broke every record the retailer had. Building an audience that wants your product before you give them a way to buy it creates leverage in every negotiation that follows, and it ensures that expansion drives immediate revenue rather than requiring months of marketing spend to build awareness in a new channel.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much is Rare Beauty worth?
Approximately $2.7 billion as of October 2025, based on industry estimates reported at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. This is not a confirmed transaction price, because Rare Beauty is a private company that has not completed a sale or IPO, and when the company explored a sale in 2024 at a $2 billion target valuation, no buyer agreed to that price.
How much does Selena Gomez own of Rare Beauty?
Gomez holds a majority stake that is widely reported as approximately 51%, though the exact percentage has never been officially confirmed by Gomez or the company. Bloomberg reported in September 2024 that roughly 81% of her $1.3 billion net worth comes from her Rare Beauty ownership stake.
Is Selena Gomez a billionaire?
The answer depends on who you ask and how they value a private company. Bloomberg declared her a billionaire in September 2024 with an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion, while Forbes disputes the figure and estimates approximately $700 million as of May 2025, with the entire difference coming from how each publication values her stake in a company that has never been sold.
What is the Rare Impact Fund?
The Rare Impact Fund is a charitable initiative funded by 1% of all Rare Beauty sales, established at the brand’s launch in September 2020. Its goal is to raise $100 million over ten years to expand access to mental health services in underserved communities, and as of 2025 the fund has raised over $20 million while supporting approximately 30 organizations across five continents.
Why is Rare Beauty blush so popular?
The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush is highly pigmented, meaning a tiny amount produces a visible flush of color, which makes the application process visually striking in short-form video. That quality made it a natural fit for TikTok, where creators demonstrated the product’s intensity in videos that accumulated over 417 million views, and the blush generated $70 million in revenue in 2023 with over 3 million units sold while accounting for more than 26% of all blush sales at Sephora.
How does Rare Beauty compare to Fenty Beauty?
Fenty Beauty reached $570 million in its first full year with LVMH’s global infrastructure behind it, while Rare Beauty reached $400 million+ by its fourth year as an independent company with no conglomerate backing. Fenty’s foundational insight was that the beauty industry had ignored dark-skinned women for decades, and Rare Beauty’s foundational insight was that the same industry had been selling women an image of perfection while ignoring the mental health crisis that image contributed to. Both brands identified a gap the industry was actively ignoring, and both built their identity around that gap rather than around their founder’s fame.
Is Rare Beauty cruelty-free?
Rare Beauty is certified cruelty-free by Leaping Bunny and does not test on animals, and the brand is also fully vegan, meaning none of its products contain animal-derived ingredients.
Who founded Rare Beauty?
Selena Gomez founded Rare Beauty and announced it in February 2020, seven months before launch. She built it around her experience with lupus, anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder, and brought in Scott Friedman, the former CEO of NYX Cosmetics, along with NYX veterans Joyce Kim and Mehdi Mehdi to run the operation.
When did Rare Beauty launch?
Rare Beauty launched in September 2020 after roughly two years of product development with a team of medical professionals, hand therapists, and beauty operators. It sold exclusively through Sephora and rarebeauty.com for its first five and a half years before expanding to all 1,500+ Ulta Beauty stores in February 2026.
Sources: Business of Fashion, Bloomberg, Forbes, Axios, WWD, Glossy, Fortune, TIME, Fast Company, Sephora Newsroom, Cosmetify, PR Newswire