DISCLAIMER: Alright let me set the record straight. Selena Gomez is America’s sweetheart, we all love a good Selena moment, and we all know that Selena Gomez is a QUEEN. This is not being written to bash on her or on her new cosmetics line. I am obsessed with her new makeup line, and I am also an advocate for mental health. I respect her as well as the meaning behind her products.
If you didn’t hear, Selena Gomez launched her own cosmetic brand called Rare Beauty sold exclusively at Sephora. This new line of products has been drawing so much attention to itself as a result of the products, the cause, and of course SELENA GOMEZ.
Rare Beauty is affordable luxury makeup and it has recently released a variety of well-reviewed products including 48 shades of foundation… WE LOVE TO SEE IT. Not to mention, Rare Beauty has incorporated something very special that it likes to call The Rare Impact Fund. This fund is an extremely important part of the brand’s message; with every product you buy, a percentage of that amount is going to fund mental health services in less fortunate communities. Mental health is something that almost everybody struggles with, including Selena herself. This makeup line was made to empower women or men to embrace their distinctive features and enhance their natural beauty.
If you tune into any beauty vloggers on YouTube, and you are a makeup addict like myself, you might already know that many of the popular makeup vloggers get sent large amounts of PR packages from beauty brands. The purpose of this is for recipients to test out different brands’ products on their channel. Rare Beauty sent out PR packages to whom it wanted to use its products. Luckily, NikkieTutorials was put on the list of recipients to get a free PR package containing all of the products from the Rare Beauty launch. For those of you who don’t know who NikkieTutorials is, she is one of my favorite beauty vloggers with a whopping 13.6 million subscribers on YouTube. She posts amazing makeup looks, as well as interviews with a wide variety of familiar faces.
Now let’s get to the tea. YouTube beauty vloggers as well as people active in the makeup community are usually pretty biased when it comes to celebrity makeup brands. Recently, many celebrities have been starting makeup lines: Kylie Jenner (Kylie Cosmetics), Rihanna (Fenty Beauty), Lady Gaga (Haus Laboratories), and the list can go on. When a celebrity drops a new cosmetics brand beauty vloggers seem to be skeptical. I never really understood why people had biased feelings towards celebrity beauty brands until I saw this video.
On September 6th, 2020, NikkieTutorials posted a video on her YouTube channel titled, “Get Glam With SELENA GOMEZ & ME”. I have been binging all of the Rare Beauty videos on YouTube- plus as I said before, I love Nikkie, so this video was a must-watch for me.
Unfortunately, this interview was done over Zoom due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, Nikkie was filming in her studio on the left half of the screen, and Gomez was featured in her new glam room on the right side of the screen. The two celebrities converse and joke around with each other throughout the video while they use the same products from the Rare Beauty launch.
I started watching the video excited to see Selena give the inside scoop on Rare Beauty. Not short after beginning the video, a variety of red flags suck out to me. Throughout the whole interview, Nikkie was teaching Selena how to apply Rare Beauty products. If I’m being honest Selena Gomez came off to be clueless about how to use her own products. She is supposed to be advertising her new brand, and in my mind, she should be the expert teaching Nikkie the most efficient ways to use each product.
As soon as the video began Selena was mentioning how unfamiliar she is with makeup. She even said that before Rare Beauty launched she didn’t even know what the point of priming your face was. Yet, she created a primer formula for her makeup line? Priming your face is a key part of the makeup process for many people in their everyday routine.
Around the five minute mark, Nikkie and Selena began applying the Liquid Touch Weightless Foundation ($29), it is a highly reviewed foundation. However, when Nikkie was taking her time applying her base evenly, Selena was applying her foundation using a very odd strategy. She was applying the foundation to her face, then followed by taking her Liquid Touch Multi-Tasking Sponge ($14) and dragging the foundation down her face. Awkwardly, this caused her base to look streaky, with many spots on her face that were not covered. Later, Nikkie had to guide Gomez into filling in her eyebrows with the Brow Harmony Pencil And Gel ($22). Selena seemed to be a little lost as to what her next move was in her own makeup routine. Towards the end of the video, they had moved on to eyeliner though you never see Selena do her eyeliner. Her eyeliner just magically appears while Nikkie is still working on her own.
I found myself shocked after the reveal of the final looks. Selena’s makeup was not looking its best, while NikkieTutorials’s end result was stunning. I do understand that Selena rarely does her own makeup by reason that she has makeup artists. It just didn’t sit well with me personally that she came off to be very lost working with her own brand. This makeup brand is for a great cause, which makes me believe that mental health is more of Selena’s purpose and passion then the cosmetics themselves. That is perfectly okay, but it makes me wonder if she even cares about the makeup because she could’ve made anything and had a percentage go to mental illness. Personally, I don’t understand how she can be in cosmetics labs picking formulas for Rare Beauty if she doesn’t know how to use specific products or what she likes.
To conclude the interview NikkieTutorials made a comment to Selena while avoiding eye contact basically explaining the beauty communities’ bias towards celebrity cosmetic lines. She explained how many celebrities see creating a makeup line as a side hustle giving them extra money. This implied that some celebrities don’t have a passion for makeup but see it more as a simple way for them to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a booming industry. I now understand the stigma behind celebrity cosmetic brands. Celebrities already have their fans as a market to sell their products to, whereas most beauty collections start without a fan-base. Celebrity cosmetic brands can pull in excessive amounts of income without even knowing much about makeup. Unfortunately, in this video, Selena Gomez looks like another one of those celebrities who is unsuitable to own a cosmetic brand.
Overall, I love Rare Beauty along with the amazing cause behind the collection. I will always have a special place in my heart for Selena Gomez. I will also happily be purchasing products from this brand to add to my excessive personal accumulation of cosmetics. However, purchasing makeup formulated by someone awfully new to the beauty community who seems clueless about her own products isn’t super convincing to me, especially because there is such a variety of brands and products to choose from.