Fenty Beauty

Fenty Beauty is a United States makeup brand founded by the singer Rihanna (Robyn Rihanna Fenty) and launched on 8 September 2017. Headquartered in San Francisco, it is a joint venture between Rihanna and the luxury group LVMH, operated through LVMH's Kendo Holdings division [6]. The brand takes its name from Rihanna's surname.

Fenty Beauty built its reputation on shade inclusivity. Its debut foundation, Pro Filt'r, arrived in roughly 40 shades — a far wider range than was standard at the time — and the launch is widely credited with pushing the wider cosmetics industry to broaden its own colour offerings [7]. The brand remains active, with continuing product launches and recent press recognition.

According to the company, Rihanna created Fenty Beauty after years of working alongside the beauty industry and still seeing "a void for products that performed across all skin tones + types and hair textures." The brand frames its starting point as a desire "for every person to feel truly represented, and not only included, but celebrated."

The brand launched in September 2017 with the Pro Filt'r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation, offered at release in approximately 40 shades. Wikipedia records that the range "drew universal acclaim for the range of shades offered," addressing a long-standing gap in cosmetics for darker skin tones. Fenty Beauty is the makeup line within a broader Fenty family that the company has since extended to include skincare, body, hair and fragrance.

Fenty Beauty is owned equally by Rihanna and LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, structured as a 50/50 joint venture [6]. Day-to-day operations run through Kendo Holdings (Kendo Brands), the LVMH division that manufactures and distributes the products. Within the LVMH stable, Fenty Beauty sits alongside beauty houses such as Benefit Cosmetics, OLEHENRIKSEN, Guerlain and Dior. Wikipedia values the overall operation at about US$2.8 billion, half of which it attributes to Rihanna as chief executive [6].

The brand positions itself around radical inclusivity, summarised in its taglines "Beauty for All" and "Makeup For All." Fenty Beauty describes its mission as making products that perform across all skin tones and types, and lists inclusivity, representation and the celebration of all skin tones among its core values. It is sold as a prestige-tier brand through Sephora and other retailers.

Philanthropy is tied directly into some products through the Clara Lionel Foundation, the charity Rihanna established in 2012 and named for her grandparents. The foundation focuses on climate resilience and on legacy work in Barbados; the company states that 35% of proceeds from its CLF 3-Piece Makeup Bag benefit the foundation [4].

The Pro Filt'r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation is the brand's flagship and the product most associated with its identity. Commentators have described a "Fenty Effect" in which the foundation's broad shade range forced competing brands to expand their own offerings; one editorial assessment writes that "when Rihanna introduced 40 shades of Pro Filt'r Foundation, the landscape of beauty was forever changed" [7]. The shade range has since grown: trade and editorial sources put the current count at around 50 [8][7], while some aggregators cite 52 [10]; the sources agree on the original 40 at launch.

Other signature products include the Gloss Bomb Universal Lip Luminizer, the Match Stix Color Adaptive sticks and the Killawatt Freestyle Highlighter. The Gloss Bomb is the brand's most popular lip gloss, praised in product reviews as a non-sticky, universally flattering hydrating gloss [9].

Fenty Beauty drew rapid acclaim after its launch. In 2017 it was named to Time magazine's list of the 25 best inventions of the year and won the WWD Beauty Inc. award for launch of the year in the prestige sector [6]. Commercially, the brand reported sales of almost 500 million euros (about US$573 million) by the end of 2018 [6].

In October 2025, the Pro Filt'r Soft Matte Foundation was inducted into Time's 2025 Best Inventions Hall of Fame — the only beauty product included that year, named alongside YouTube, the Nintendo Switch and OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 [8].

Fenty Beauty is an active, globally distributed brand. Its most recent notable milestone was the October 2025 Time Hall of Fame induction, and its e-commerce site continues to run product launches and promotions across the wider Fenty range [8].