A Makeup Brand Launched During Quarantine

    Would you put on makeup when wearing a face mask?

    Inspired by my classmate Deirdre's blog post, I started to look into the impacts of COVID-19 on the makeup industry. Before reading her post, I would assume that most people are like myself, pretty much give up on the idea of wearing makeup since over 50% of our face is coved by a mask anyway. But if we do a quick search on YouTube, beauty YouTubers have turned their focus from contour and eyebrow tutorials to offering tips and ideas for long-lasting makeup to wear under face mask. Most importantly, still gathering a ton of attention.

    While experts estimated a fall of 20%-30% in the beauty industry in 2020, Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez's makeup brand, still managed a quite successful launch through social media. I thought it might be a cool idea to track Rare Beauty's online launching process to see what did they do right to gather enough exposure when makeup is not as needed during this challenging time.

    

     If the name Rare Beauty sounds familiar to you, it's because Selena's new album shares the same name.         

    On August 4th, Selene Gomez announced on her Instagram account, which has over 194 million followers, that Rare Beauty will be officially launching on September 3rd. This post quickly generated hundreds of thousands of likes on Instagram with Selena's fans expressing their excitement for the celebrity to finally joining the beauty world. Meanwhile, Rare Beauty's official Instagram account released a short video with the founder explaining more in detail her beauty and makeup philosophy. The account so far has nearly 2 million followers.

    Instagram is not the only place that Rare Beauty generated heat. In the week of September 3rd, the official launching date of the brand, some of the most famous beauty YouTubers like James Charles, NikkieTutorials, and Manny Mua uploaded videos reviewing Rare Beauty products. 

     What seemed really interesting to me was that those YouTube videos were not all in the same form. Some were the typical reviewing type with the YouTuber trying on the product in front of the camera. Others, such as NikkieTutorial's video, the YouTuber actually made a video call to Selena Gomez, and they were putting on makeup simultaneously in the video with Selena introducing each product herself. This video got nearly 9 million views and was on the trending video of the day. 

    In other words, if you are on YouTube often, it was almost impossible to ignore the launch of Rare Beauty during that period.

    Among all the YouTube videos related to Rare Beauty, Patrick Starrr's review was a controversial one. Starrr, with his own beauty brand, made many comparisons between his own products and Gomez's. Fans took issue with his review, saying that Starrr was using the video to promote his own brand. This caused quite some fuzz on social media, and several days later, Rare Beauty responded to the situation on Twitter:

    

   

 And Patrick Starrr's response was:

    

    In the spirit of the Groundswell, I'd say Rare Beauty is doing a great job managing its online image as well.