Rare Beauty

The conversation around mental health has become too loud to ignore, particularly in the workplace. According to a survey from the American Psychological Association, 71% of workers believe employers are more concerned about their staff’s mental health than in the past. And 81% said they’ll look for workplaces that support mental health when seeking future job opportunities. Employers addressing mental health concerns in the workplace isn’t just something nice to do; it directly affects a company's bottom line, since depression and anxiety costs companies $1 trillion per year globally due to lost work days. So it makes sense that more companies are taking employee mental health seriously—even more so when it's the focal point of a brand's mission. In 2020, Selena Gomez launched her makeup line Rare Beauty in tandem with the Rare Impact Fund, an initiative aiming to raise $100 million over the next 10 years to increase access to mental health resources. One percent of Rare Beauty’s sales goes to the fund, with additional money coming from philanthropic organizations. To date, Rare Impact has raised more than $5 million and invested $3 million to 23 grantees expanding access to mental health services worldwide, including the Black Teacher Project, Trans Lifeline, and the Friends of the Semel Institute. “We built this mission into the brand since before this brand launched,” says Elyse Cohen, VP of social impact and inclusion at Rare Beauty and president of the Rare Impact Fund. “I truly believe that is critical to [our] success, but also to building social impact and corporate social responsibility into any brand.” Elyse Cohen [Photo: Vijat M.] Rare Beauty entered an already crowded cosmetics industry filled with other celebrity-founded brands. But from the beginning, Cohen says they aimed to differentiate the brand by focusing on promoting self-acceptance and using makeup to embrace what makes the wearer unique, instead of covering up imperfections. That messaging correlates to promoting mental health, and Gomez has been candid over the years in sharing her own experiences with anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Starting the conversation around mental health, and subsequently building a brand with mental health at its core, has created a community "like nothing many of us have ever seen before,” Cohen says, “particularly in the brand space.” Back in 2020, Rare Beauty launched weekly virtual chats to create a space for its community to talk about mental health. That initiative spilled over into real life earlier in May when the company hosted its first-ever in-person summit. The Rare Beauty Mental Health Summit brought together 150 thought leaders, creators, health experts, and community members in Los Angeles with nearly 50,000 people joining virtually via a TikTok livestream. Rare Beauty Mental Health Summit: Elyse Fox, Whitney Simmons, Carla Ibarra, and Ayesha Meer [Photo: Flannery Underwood] In addition to funding mental health resources and creating communities virtually and IRL, Rare Beauty has launched Your Words Matter, an education campaign offering guidance in how to talk about mental health; cohosted the first White House Mental Health Youth Action Forum;

Since launching in 2020, Selena Gomez has placed mental health at the core of Rare Beauty’s business.

These days, many beauty brands have a philanthropic arm, a cause they back that matters to them. For Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty, its mission beyond beauty was baked in from the very beginning, even before the company launched in 2020.

Named in conjunction with “Rare”—both an album and a song released by Gomez in 2020, the same year as Rare Beauty’s launch—Gomez told Harper’s Bazaar Arabia that “For a long time, I wanted to create a brand that also had an important message.”

"We are devastated by the images & reports coming from the Middle East. Thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes & millions of civilians have been displaced & left without access to food, water, medicine, or basic necessities for survival. A large number of these victims are children. Palestinian civilians must be protected, period," the post reads.

“She KNOWS exactly the power and influence she holds, she just doesn’t want to use it,” one viral tweet read.

Selena first made a statement on the conflict at the end of last month, where she said, "I've been taking a break from social media because my heart breaks to see all of the horror, hate, violence, and terror that's going on in the world."

Rare Beauty issued a statement in support of providing aid to Gaza on Monday. (Getty Images)

The company says it will donate to Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross organization, the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which is part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and UNICEF.

A statement made by Rare Beauty, the cosmetics company founded and owned by Selena Gomez, on the Israel and Palestine conflict is the latest in a series of posts associated with the artist to garner criticism.

Yesterday, Rare Beauty posted an in-depth statement onto its Instagram under the title, "Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza."

However, even those choosing to remain neutral are sparking uproar online. The latest example is singer and actress Selena Gomez, whose social-media post on the topic didn't sit well with some users. Along with the 31-year-old's statement, claims that Rare Beauty's CEO Scott Friedman is a "Zionist" have led to calls for a boycott of her cosmetics line. Newsweek has reached out to Selena Gomez and Rare Beauty for comment via email.

The same week I chatted with Cohen, the Rare Impact Fund partnered with fashion brand Pacsun to launch the Rare DNM Edit—its sixth collection that so far has generated over $2 million in support of youth mental health globally. The six-piece collection, priced from $55 to $125, includes baggy shorts, baggy jeans and a denim miniskirt and is geared to those heading back to school in August; 10% of the sales from each Rare DNM Edit style purchased goes to the Rare Impact Fund.

Fast-forward to a few days ago, and the Artists 4 Ceasefire letter to President Biden was released. "We ask that, as President of the United States, you and the US Congress call for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Gaza and Israel before another life is lost," it reads. "As of this writing more than 6,000 bombs have been dropped on Gaza in the last 12 days — resulting in one child being killed every 15 minutes." Selena was one of the signatories.