Beauty for All: Rihanna’s releases inclusive cosmetics line

Emily Fornof | Staff Artist

The Bomb has dropped.  The Gloss Bomb from Fenty Beauty, that is.  Not only did Rihanna’s new beauty brand release this all-purpose gloss, she has your whole face covered.

Branded after Rihanna’s last name, Fenty, the complexion-focused brand is designed to offer all the necessary products to complete your look, from foundation to highlighter to contour.  

Before its premiere last Friday, Rihanna released a preview video, featuring a diverse range of models, alluding to the wide spectrum of skin tones accounted for in the brand.

Her highly anticipated Pro Filt’r foundation comes in 40 shades meant to offer variety to all skin tones, even focusing on hard-to-match tones. While many other brands offer a similar quantity of shades, they usually fail to account for those with deeper-colored skin. Brands will distinguish between “light natural” and “light natural beige,” yet they dictate one color for all dark-skinned users, making it difficult for non-white consumers to find the makeup they want at the quality and price they want.

Serving different skin tones does not stop with just what is being offered, but carries over into how the products are modeled.  The oversaturation of white models in the cosmetic industry leaves many consumers of color unsure of how products will look on them.  

With Fenty Beauty’s wide range of models, it can be easier to visualize how items will fit.  Almost every model wears the Gloss Bomb, showing it off on a variety of skin and lip tones. Throughout all the looks, different products are mixed and matched giving a range of models for wearing a certain item.  So while one model may be featured for the product’s page, a quick browse of other items will show the same product used in other looks on other skin tones.

“The biggest challenge was making sure that each product covered all skin tones, and it was a challenge I was up for,”  Rihanna said in an interview with BAZAAR.com. “I didn’t care how long it took, I was going to make sure that we covered most skin tones. Diversity and inclusivity are important to the brand. I hope that fans, makeup lovers, and makeup artists feel that.”

After two years of development, Rihanna reached her criteria.  Since its release, Fenty has received rave reviews, being praised for its quality and diversity.

Unlike some other celebrity makeup brands, like Kylie Jenner’s Lip Kits, Rihanna offers her items in a nationwide store, Sephora.  This move gives users the convenience of testing out the products and taking full advantage of the various skin tones, allowing shoppers to find what actually fits them more easily.

Accessibility of products is not the only area of comparison between Jenner’s celebrity makeup brand and Rihanna’s.  In what some believe to be a reaction to Fenty, Kylie Cosmetics promoted its “Brown Sugar” shade not once, not twice, but five times this past weekend.  The shade, meant to be “the nude for deeper skin tones” sold out at its release last year and was restocked the for the first time this past week.

On Friday, the same day as the Fenty release, Kylie Cosmetics tweeted its highlighter, which some find unfit for darker skin tones. Then Jenner herself unfollowed Rihanna on Instagram. Both these acts have left those in the #RihannaNavy trolling Jenner on social media over her one-sided battle.

While all Fenty products are rumored to be stocked up for the next two years, with its mass popularity, you had better act quickly if you want a #fentyface.

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