With the release of her Fenty Beauty cosmetic line on September 8th, music star, philanthropist, and style icon Rihanna displays to the world how focused on inclusion and diversity her cosmetic line is, and will continue to be.
Fenty Beauty is Rihanna’s first custom collection of cosmetics. On Fenty Beauty’s official website, the header simply reads, “Beauty for All.” The home page also features a quote from Rihanna describing her campaign, saying, “Fenty Beauty was created for everyone: for women of all shades, personalities, attitudes, cultures, and races.”
The certified double platinum singer believes in the celebration of diversity, and wants her collection to do just that. “I wanted everyone to feel included,” she writes. “That’s the real reason I made this line.”
At the cosmetic line launch party, Rihanna spoke to makeup artists and fans alike about her drive to include everyone’s needs when creating Fenty Beauty.
“It was really important for me. And in every product, I was like, there needs to be something for a dark-skinned girl, there needs to be something for a really pale girl, there needs to be something in between,” she says.
Rihanna continues to explain how she tries to take all aspects of cosmetic shading into consideration. “There are so many different shades; there are red undertones, green undertones, blue undertones, pink undertones, there’s yellow—and you just never know, so you want people to appreciate the product and not feel like, ‘oh that’s cute, but it only looks good on her,’” she said.
“Rihanna has been working on Fenty Beauty for quite some time,” Vogue reports, “(first reports of the project emerged around April 2016), but the line’s release seems to come at a perfect time for the singer: if anything, it continues to be the bad gal’s quest to expand how beauty is defined.”
Fenty Beauty’s first official campaign video featured models like Duckie Thot, Halima Aden, Slick Woods, Indyamarie Jean, and other models of color turning a city street into a catwalk. The video was met with widespread approval on social media because of the video’s representation of people of color.
Model Leomie Anderson, who is also seen in the Fenty Beauty campaign, sparked widespread debate when she tweeted back in 2016, “Why is it that the black makeup artists are always busy with blonde white girls and slaying their makeup and I have to supply my own foundation?”
In addition to Anderson, many other people of color have also expressed their disappointing experiences with makeup shade inclusion, and it seems that Rihanna has heard their complaints loud and clear. Rihanna uses her own cosmetic line to allow access to a diverse range of makeup shades that she believes everyone deserves.
Fenty Beauty is off to a strong start. The collection seems to stand as Ri’s own personal love letter to makeup, as well as her own effort to allow everyone an equal share of makeup representation. Not surprisingly, patrons have not been disappointed.
Featured Image by wenthwort on Flickr
Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
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