Rare Beauty review

Most celebrity beauty brands are a licensing deal with a face attached. Rare Beauty, launched by Selena Gomez in 2020, is not, and the evidence is in two places most reviews skip past: the packaging and the fund.

The blush

Soft Pinch Liquid Blush is the product. It is a thin, fluid formula with an extraordinarily high pigment load — one small dot, less than half a pump, covers both cheeks. It blends out to a skin-like matte or dewy finish depending on the variant, and it lasts through a working day without the patchiness that kills most liquid blushes.

The pigment load is also the main criticism. If you dispense a full pump you will be wearing a stripe, and nothing short of starting over will fix it. This is a product that rewards restraint, and a lot of the early one-star reviews were people applying it like a liquid foundation.

At around $23 for 7.5 ml it looks expensive per millilitre and works out extremely cheap per use, because a bottle lasts most people the better part of a year. Bliss, Joy, Hope and Encourage are the four shades that suit the widest range of skin tones.

The packaging nobody talks about

Look at a Rare Beauty product properly and you notice the caps are asymmetric, with a raised ridge you can hook a finger under. The blush bottle has a moulded grip. Several products are designed to be opened with one hand, and the doe-foot applicators are set at an angle that works if your fine motor control is limited.

This is deliberate. Rare Beauty worked on accessibility in its packaging design from the start, and it remains close to the only mainstream beauty brand where you can pick up a product and see the decision. That is unglamorous work and it should be the thing the brand is best known for.

The complexion range

Liquid Touch Weightless Foundation runs to 48 shades with genuine depth and undertone spread at both ends — a range built after 2017, by people who had learned the lesson. It is a light-to-medium coverage, natural-finish formula that is easy to wear and not especially distinctive.

Liquid Touch Brightening Concealer is good, with a comparable shade range. Positive Light Liquid Luminizer is a well-judged liquid highlighter with a finely milled shimmer that reads as skin rather than glitter.

None of these are bad. None of them would be famous without the blush.

Ethics

The Rare Impact Fund commits 1% of all revenue to expanding access to mental-health services, and — crucially — publishes what it has raised and where it has gone rather than leaving the pledge as a line on an about page. Combined with the accessibility work and a consistent cruelty-free position, this is the highest ownership-and-ethics score in the makeup category and it is earned.

How to actually use the blush

Because the failure mode is so specific, it is worth spelling out. The correct amount is roughly half a pump — a dot the size of a lentil, dispensed onto the back of the hand rather than straight onto the face. Pick it up with a fingertip or a damp sponge, tap it onto the high point of the cheek, and blend outward immediately. The formula sets within about fifteen seconds and after that it does not move.

Build in two thin passes rather than one heavy one. If you do overdo it, a clean damp sponge pressed over the area will lift some of it; a dry brush will not.

The matte shades — Joy, Happy, Grateful — are more pigmented than the dewy ones and need a lighter hand still. The dewy finishes are more forgiving and are where a first-time buyer should start.

The other thing the brand does well

Shade names across the range are emotional rather than descriptive — Joy, Hope, Worthy, Encourage — which is easy to dismiss as branding. In practice it removes a category of unpleasantness that beauty is full of: no shade here is called "Nude", "Fair" or "Deep", so no shade is implicitly the default one.

Price

$16 to $34. This is accessible prestige and the pricing has stayed disciplined since launch, which is increasingly rare.

The verdict

Buy the blush. Buy a second shade of the blush. Try the Liquid Luminizer if you want highlighter that does not announce itself.

Rare Beauty is a one-product brand in the way that very good one-product brands are — the product is excellent enough to justify the whole operation, and the operation is run with more care than the category norm.