When Selena Gomez founded Rare Beauty in 2020, she wanted the cosmetics brand to have meaning and represent different people.
Gomez, a recording artist, actress, and entrepreneur, found that meaning through the Rare Impact Fund, Rare Beauty’s nonprofit foundation, which she established to help expand youth mental health resources worldwide.
Over the past five years, the Rare Impact Fund has supported 30 nonprofit partner organizations across five continents with grants and contributions, training 208,000 educators and reaching 3.5 million young people. The fund’s goal is to mobilize $100 million.
“It is a business, but I just don’t ever like to see it that way. I always like to believe we are super mission driven and I’m very proud of what the company will evolve [into],” Gomez said on Thursday at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York City. “But when I think about the $30 million we’ve raised and the 3.1 million teams we have across the world . . . that’s [what] makes the business [worthwhile].”
Rare Beauty donates 1% of its sales revenue to the impact fund. “What’s become really special is that so many of our community members, our customers, come to us for these incredible products, but they really stay around because of the mission and the connection and the resources that they find in the work that we do,” said Elyse Cohen, chief impact officer of Rare Beauty and president of the Rare Impact Fund.
Rare Beauty connects to the mission with products named after something Gomez sees as empowering on some level, such as its blush shade Happy or lip liner shade Intuitive. “The moment you pick up a product, we want you to feel empowered,” Gomez said. “So I think words and everything are crucial, but I love that we can talk about it.”
As the beauty brand expands, the fund does as well. Cohen explained that’s exactly how the strategy was built. “So when we went global and we entered the U.K. market and we entered Southeast Asia, we worked with on-the-ground folks, experts to really help us identify organizations within those spaces,” Cohen said.
“I will say that mental health and the conversation around it is very different in different regions, and we’re very careful about knowing what we don’t know and not entering a market trying to be an expert,” she added. “It’s certainly about who’s doing what already there and how can we amplify and mobilize a bit more in that space.”
Describing this as a natural evolution, Cohen drove home how much the Rare Beauty community cares about the mission, which is seen on social media as well. The Rare Impact Fund intentionally does not have its own Instagram page. All content related to the fund is posted on Rare Beauty’s page, which is built into the content strategy of the business.
“We have 15 million-plus followers on the Rare Beauty account, and to us, it’s important to really connect and focus on that community,” Cohen said. “It allows us to bring the resources and the content of what the fund does directly to the people the brand serves.”
Other companies have followed Rare Beauty’s lead of connecting to the nonprofit world and developed their own initiatives. Gomez said it’s cool to see brands do that, and she’s not concerned about losing any competitive advantage in the market. “In a way, I think there’s room for everyone,” Gomez said. “I don’t think what we’re doing is better or worse than anyone else.”
This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the current mission of the Rare Impact Fund.