Fenty Beauty review

In September 2017 Fenty Beauty launched Pro Filt'r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation in forty shades. Within weeks the deepest shades sold out across almost every market, which told the industry something it had been told repeatedly and had chosen not to hear: the demand had always been there, and the shade ranges had simply been built by people who were not looking.

Everything that followed — the competitor ranges that suddenly expanded, the "Fenty effect" think pieces, the shade-count arms race — happened because one launch proved the commercial case. That is the brand's real achievement and it does not depreciate.

The shade range, checked properly

Shade count is easy to fake. A range of fifty shades with forty in the light-to-medium band and ten crammed into everything darker is a marketing number. What Fenty did, and still does, is distribute depth evenly and vary undertone within each depth band — olive, neutral, warm and cool options at levels where most brands offer one.

The deepest shades are genuinely deep, with the red and blue undertones that deep skin actually has rather than a flat brown. The lightest shades include genuinely pale options with pink and neutral undertones rather than a single beige. This is the part competitors still get wrong when they copy the shade count without doing the pigment work.

Match Stix and Killawatt Freestyle Highlighter follow the same logic: the highlighter shades are formulated to read on deep skin rather than to sit on it as a grey film, which is a specific pigment-selection problem most brands solve badly or not at all.

How the formulas hold up

Pro Filt'r Soft Matte Longwear is a true long-wear matte. It sets firmly, does not transfer much, and lasts a working day. The trade-off is the usual one: it will find dry patches and sit in them if the skin underneath is not prepped. The Hydrating Longwear version added in 2019 is the better everyday option for most people and the one we would point a first-time buyer at.

Gloss Bomb Universal Lip Luminizer is the product we would recommend to someone who does not care about makeup at all. It is a non-sticky, high-shine gloss with enough pigment to do something and not enough to require precision, and Fenty Glow suits an implausible range of skin tones. At around $22 it is also the cheapest way into the brand.

Eaze Drop Blurring Skin Tint is a light-coverage option for people who want the shade range without the coverage. Invisimatte Blotting Powder is a well-judged translucent that does not turn grey on deeper skin — again, a pigment decision rather than a marketing one.

Where it is weaker

Fenty Skin, launched in 2020, is the noticeably weaker sibling. Total Cleans'r is a serviceable cleanser; Fat Water is a toner-serum hybrid with niacinamide at an undisclosed percentage; Hydra Vizor is a mineral SPF moisturiser that is decent but not remarkable. The skincare range does not have the same command of its category that the colour range has, and the prices assume it does.

The colour range has also expanded past the point of clear necessity. The core of this brand — complexion, Gloss Bomb, Killawatt, Match Stix — is tight and excellent. A lot of what has been added since does not obviously fill a gap.

What the industry actually learned

It is worth being precise about what changed after 2017, because a lot of the credit has been misapplied.

Shade counts went up everywhere, almost immediately. That was the easy part and it is largely done. What has not been fixed, seven years on, is the harder problem underneath: the pigment blends used for deep shades. A great many ranges added deep foundations by darkening an existing base, which produces shades that go grey or muddy on skin because the underlying pigment mix was never designed to go that deep. You can see it in the number of brands whose deepest four shades share an obviously identical undertone.

Fenty's deep shades have red, olive and blue variation because the formulation work was done at that end of the range rather than extrapolated toward it. The same is true of the powders — Invisimatte does not flash grey — and the highlighters, where most brands' pigments simply sit on top of deeper skin.

That is the part still worth measuring competitors against, and it is why this brand keeps a perfect range-and-fit score while several rivals with bigger shade counts do not.

Ownership and price

Fenty Beauty is a joint venture between Rihanna and LVMH, operated through Kendo. That is disclosed clearly and the brand has never pretended to be an independent operation.

Prices run roughly $20 to $42, which puts it at the accessible end of prestige. They have risen since launch, as everything has, but the range has not been quietly cheapened to protect margin.

The verdict

Buy Pro Filt'r Hydrating if you want coverage, Eaze Drop if you do not, and Gloss Bomb regardless. Skip Fenty Skin unless something in it specifically solves a problem for you.

Eight years after launch, Fenty is still the range we check a competitor's shade offering against. That is the strongest thing you can say about a makeup brand.