Rare Beauty: a founder, creators, and 23.6 billion hashtag views

November 8, 2026

Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty in 2020. Five years later it is one of the most visible beauty brands on TikTok, and the founder is still its biggest creator.

Background

Rare Beauty launched with the Rare Impact Fund, which aims to raise $100 million for mental health over ten years source. Net sales passed $400 million in the year to February 2024 source. Glossy reported that one liquid blush sold every three seconds in 2024, that launches use "massive seeding", and that TikTok followers grew from 1.2 million in 2023 to 4.5 million source. In January 2025 the brand ran its first campaign starring creators next to Gomez source.

Then and now

Strategy now

• The founder on screen. Selena Gomez is tagged 32 times in the last 114 posts. The latest launch, a blush bundle with Demi Lovato, produced the top two TikToks: 14.9M and 10.4M views.
• High volume. 90 TikToks in 65 days, the fastest rate of the ten brands, and 24 Instagram posts in 11 days.
• Retail in the loop. Sephora is tagged 10 times.

What stands out

Rare Beauty's Instagram is the strongest of the set: a median reel gets 3.4M plays and a median post 149,575 likes. On TikTok, median engagement of 9.9% puts it in the top three, despite posting more than once a day.

Lessons

1. A founder with an audience is a channel. Use it, and keep the founder visible.
2. Volume can work when the content is native. Daily posting did not dilute engagement here.
3. Seed the hero product. The blush did not go viral by accident; it was sent to creators at scale.

How we pulled the numbers

About 9 credits of ScrapeIO calls, the same ones any script or AI agent can make:

curl "https://scrapeio.com/v1/tiktok/profile?handle=rarebeauty" -H "x-api-key: $SCRAPEIO_API_KEY"
curl "https://scrapeio.com/v3/tiktok/profile/videos?handle=rarebeauty" -H "x-api-key: $SCRAPEIO_API_KEY"   # 3 pages
curl "https://scrapeio.com/v2/instagram/user/posts?handle=rarebeauty" -H "x-api-key: $SCRAPEIO_API_KEY"  # 2 pages
curl "https://scrapeio.com/v1/tiktok/search/hashtag?hashtag=rarebeauty" -H "x-api-key: $SCRAPEIO_API_KEY"

Engagement rate is (likes + comments + shares) / views for each video, and we report the median so one viral post does not skew it. To run the same audit on any brand from Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, install the skills with npx skills add xhoantran/scrapeio-agent and ask for a competitor social audit.

Sources

Social numbers pulled through the ScrapeIO API on 8 November 2026 (UTC); they change daily. Everything else is from the sources below. This is an independent analysis of public data, not affiliated with or endorsed by the brand.

• https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessicagold/2020/07/22/selena-gomezs-rare-beauty-pledges-to-raise-100m-for-mental-health/
• https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/beauty/selena-gomezs-rare-beauty-exploring-an-ipo-or-sale-as-revenue-crosses-400-million/
• https://www.glossy.co/pop/exclusive-inside-rare-beautys-plan-to-own-the-blush-category/
• https://www.glossy.co/pop/exclusive-rare-beauty-expands-its-bestselling-soft-pinch-franchise-and-launches-first-creator-campaign