As LVMH reportedly moves to offload its 50% stake in Fenty Beauty, the brand’s migration from prime retail placement to the periphery suggests that the celebrity-led disruptor era is reaching a sobering, institutional end

Fenty wall at Sephora

Walking into Sephora Ion Orchard store recently, we were not greeted by Fenty Beauty. In fact, we did not immediately catch sight of the brand. Upon its debut here in September 2017, it secured a spot in the flagship store so front-and-center that you practically had to trip over the displays to enter. Now, Fenty Beauty is further inside, behind other brands that many had thought founder and creator Rihanna would be able to stay ahead of: Charlotte Tilbury right in front, followed by Makeup by Mario, Rare Beauty, and Patrick Ta. And, interestingly, Fenty Beauty’s immediate neighbour is fellow faded brand, Kylie Cosmetics, launched three years before the former. The retail landscape is delightfully honest about its priorities: shelf placement is a brutal scoreboard. In the placement sequencing we saw, make‑up-artist‑founded brands are winning the hierarchy. Charlotte Tilbury is one of fashion’s favourite adopted daughters, Mario Dedivanovic leveraged his status as Kim Kardashian’s makeup artist, and red-carpet favourite Vietnamese-American Patrick Ta is known for his “glow” aesthetics. These are make-up artists first, brand owners second. All of them offer something Fenty Beauty never truly did: substance tethered to craft.

While Fenty Beauty shares a retail zone with other star-created names—such as Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty—relying solely on founder-fame is a strategy with finite shelf life. Rihanna launched her brand nearly nine years ago and the star product was the foundation. It came in a staggering line-up of 40 shades and the initial success of that range was described as a “wake-up call” for the business, forcing the entire industry to recalibrate inclusivity standards. After the debut shockwave, Fenty Beauty hasn’t really delivered another moment that could be called groundbreaking. Sure, it has expanded on the number of shades—now some 50—and added more products to the line, but they have not redefined the market. Forty shades of ‘skin’ were revolutionary in 2017, but today 50 are simply table stakes. In 2020, Rihanna launched Fenty Skin. As the products sit alongside Fenty Beauty, they blurred boundaries with the older Fenty sister, recycling inclusivity rhetoric and sleek packaging. Instead of expanding the brand universe, it fragmented it. Current Fenty Skin launches emphasise fragrance, texture, and sensorial experience. This is a pivot away from inclusivity disruption toward lifestyle indulgence. When Fenty Beauty (or Skin) stops solving a critical problem for the consumer, they are no longer an essential target; they are merely another option on the shelf.

Freestanding floor display of Fenty Beauty’s famed foundations

During the time we spent at the Fenty Beauty space, not a single customer was seen testing , or even browsing. When we pointed this observation to a make-up artist, her assessment was blunt: “their products are, frankly, just okay; they don’t feel premium.” In fact, to us, Fenty Beauty, despite its prestige positioning and the prominence of Rihanna’s face at their points of purchase, has the tactile quality of Maybelline, only with a more daring price point. In terms of raw, day-long performance of the foundation, for instance, Maybelline frequently matches or even surpasses Fenty Beauty. Many beauty reviewers, cosmetic chemists, and daily consumers find that the price gap between prestige and drugstore makeup does not directly translate to a gap in staying power, sweat resistance, or oil control. Whether it’s Fenty or Maybelline, we’re mostly paying for the brand’s pedigree, not the periodic table. Behind the glossy marketing, both brands refer to the same industrial ingredient catalogue; the extra fans pay for Fenty merely buys a better-scented bottle and a more sophisticated shade range, rather than a breakthrough in chemistry. In all likelihood, LVMH does not need a Maybelline-adjacent brand in their portfolio of prestige.

There is a vast difference between a brand that is commercially ubiquitous—stable, high-volume, and predictable—and one that is premium, exclusive, and culturally generative. In Sephora, Fenty Beauty looks to us to have firmly crossed over into the former. If price tag and brand prestige do not automatically guarantee unique or superior cosmetic chemistry, what has Fenty Beauty going for it? Some people point out the distribution advantage of Sephora’s global presence that it enjoys. That can certainly keep Fenty Beauty physically present, but without fresh semiotic power, it risks becoming a zombie brand: alive in stores, dead in meaning. Sephora’s store placement of the brand is a coded admission: Fenty Beauty is no longer a growth driver, it’s a brand being sustained by infrastructure rather than vitality. LVMH has a long history of pruning or divesting brands that are low on clout. They don’t sentimentalise; they measure aura—a dreaded requisite—in sales and relevance. When the “willingness to pay a premium for a non-essential good” slips, it does not matter if the brand initially commanded the support of a powerful conglomerate. Retail mortality isn’t a debate; when a brand has to go, it has to go.

The sister line Fenty Skin

This would not be the first time LVMH rids itself of a Fenty brand. In 2021, it killed Fenty Maison, a clothing line launched two years after the beauty line, based not on design skill or technical know-how, but on Rihanna’s fame and her ability to dress herself. Back then, we noted that the singer “seemed to be answering to gratifiable vanity than vocational calling”. LVMH’s bold experiment simply didn’t work—both commercially and structurally. It was supposed to be historic: the first new maison the conglomerate had created since Christian Lacroix in 1987, and the first ever led by a Black woman. But the venture collapsed under poor sales, the COVID-19 pandemic, and, critically, what was indeterminate brand identity. Fenty Maison leaned on Rihanna’s aura, but lacked a clear design language. It wasn’t artistry‑driven, such as Dior or Vuitton, nor was it disruptive enough to carve its own niche. It just predated Kylie Jenner’s Khy, but with richer backers. LVMH’s repeated desire to want the Fenty label out is damning. It suggests that Fenty as a brand name is not being accorded heritage asset status. Rather, it is similar to a venture capital experiment: launch, hype, exit. LVMH is effectively writing Rihanna’s aura out of its repertoire twice in less than a decade.

This shows that a social-media-age aesthetic aura cannot be gainfully treated as a repeatable, industrial process; this is where the strategy fundamentally broke down. When we think about it, there is one glaring question that no one seems to be asking: what has Rihanna really achieved that can be considered a massive success other than keeping her aura vivid? The uncomfortable truth is that Rihanna has pivoted away from sustained artistic output, even with her singing career. Her music arc is the clearest example. She released eight albums in just over a decade, then stopped in 2016. The hiatus wasn’t framed as retirement, but as suspension—her aura filled the gap, not continuous output. Rihanna’s pregnancies, more publicly evident than many expectant stars’, became the visual strategy, and her fashion choices for maternity wear turned into cultural theatre. She wasn’t releasing music, she wasn’t sustaining her ventures, but she was sustaining visibility by becoming the most famous pregnant star each time she carried a child. Every bump‑baring dress, sheer panel, or oversized hoodie was staged as a fashion statement. A simple outing turned into a runway. The spectacular replaced the substantive. Even turning up late at the Met Galas was a sight to behold. Fenty Beauty, in turn, becomes the latest casualty on the altar of the aura-first economy.

Photos: Chin Boh Kay