How Rare Beauty Became One of the Fastest-Growing Beauty Brands on Instagram

Introduction

Plenty of celebrities have launched beauty brands. Most coast on the founder's fame, then fade. Rare Beauty did the opposite: it built an audience before it built a product, led with feeling instead of gloss, then turned its customers into its marketing department. The result was one of the fastest-growing beauty brands on Instagram, plus a business that outgrew even Selena Gomez's enormous fame.

Here is how, with the timeline, the financials, plus the five-pillar influencer strategy any brand can study.

Audience before product

Rare Beauty launched in September 2020, yet the story started earlier. Selena Gomez announced it on Instagram in February 2020 with a behind-the-scenes video that drew more than 8 million views and over 1.8 million likes, building anticipation long before anyone could buy anything. Unlike traditional beauty brands, Rare Beauty built its audience before it built its product line.

The brand's identity is rooted in Gomez's own journey and values, which gives it instant credibility and emotional weight. It launched into a specific moment too, a pandemic when people were anxious and rethinking what feeling good meant, so its message of self-acceptance and mental health spoke directly into that. The mission was never a marketing layer. It was the foundation.

The growth, by the numbers

The financial trajectory shows just how fast emotional connection can scale. Figures are reported estimates from published analyses.

Sources: HypeAuditor, Impulze, Brand Vision, Supliful, WWD, Arthnova. Figures are reported estimates and vary by source.

The growth rate, reported at roughly 35 to 50% year over year, outpaced many celebrity competitors that entered beauty in the same era. And it kept compounding: gaining around a million Instagram followers in 2024 to 2025 ranked it third on one list of the fastest-growing beauty brands, years after launch.

The five-pillar strategy

Rare Beauty's marketing rests on five reinforcing pillars. Together they explain the growth far better than Gomez's fame alone.

• Emotion-led content. The feed leads with feeling, not just visuals, warm, expressive and relatable even at global scale. It feels like a community, not a storefront.
• Community and UGC. Most content is Reels of creators and fans using products in everyday life. Hashtags like #RareBeauty and #RareRoutine turn customers into creators, while fan edits and music mashups get a spotlight from the brand itself.
• Micro-influencers first. Rather than leaning only on celebrity endorsements, Rare Beauty partners with micro-influencers and its own community, building a multi-layered, authentic presence that boosts trust and engagement.
• Purpose woven in. Every campaign ties back to mental health awareness and self-acceptance, including TikTok challenges like #UseKindWords that pair a kindness message with product. The Rare Impact Fund commits 1% of annual sales toward a $100 million, decade-long mental health pledge.
• Accessible viral product. The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush became a cultural phenomenon at an accessible price point, prestige feel without a prestige-only price, giving creators an easy, shareable hero product.

Why it beat other celebrity brands

The beauty aisle is crowded with celebrity launches, Fenty, Kylie Cosmetics, Rhode, Haus Labs. Rare Beauty stood out. The contrast is instructive.

That distinction is why Rare Beauty posts consistent growth while some peers plateau or decline from a launch-day peak. Authentic, mission-driven branding plus viral product innovation proved more durable than star power alone, even against larger rivals.

Lessons for brands

You do not need a global pop star to use this playbook. The principles travel.

• Build the audience first. Anticipation and community before launch turn day one into a moment, not a cold start.
• Lead with emotion, not just product shots. A feed that makes people feel something gets shared. A catalogue does not.
• Make fans the content engine. Branded hashtags and spotlighting UGC turn customers into a creative team that works for free.
• Go micro and community-led. Many credible small creators build more trust than one big endorsement. And they scale.
• Mean your mission. Purpose only resonates when it is real and built into the business, as the Rare Impact Fund is, not layered on for a campaign.

How to use this with Flinque

The engine under Rare Beauty's growth was not Selena Gomez. It was a community of micro-creators and fans making authentic content at scale. Reproducing that means finding and vetting many credible small creators whose audiences genuinely fit, which is the hard, unglamorous part of a community-led strategy.

With Flinque you can search 10M+ verified creators by niche to surface beauty micro and mid-tier creators, run a fake follower check to confirm audiences are real, then benchmark engagement so you build a roster that is authentic rather than just large, exactly the foundation Rare Beauty built on. For more on this approach, see our guide to Gen Z beauty brands and influencer marketing.