Consciously or not, everyone knows about celebrity brands. From Sephora shelves to sneakily branded tonic water and investment apps, it seems that famous people are trying to sell products at every turn. While this phenomenon certainly isn’t new — Amelia Earhart launched her own clothing line in the 1930s —celebrity brands seem more prevalent than ever. Within this realm, there’s the good, the bad, and the bankrupt, when a household name isn’t enough to keep a poor product in stores.
“A lot of celebrity brands are really popular, especially, like, Rhode by Hailey. I think because people know the face, you know? So it’s like, because they know the face, they want to buy the product,” Berkeley High School freshman Salma Rached said.
The entertainment industry has long been utilized to sell goods to the public, with advertisements, product placements, and celebrity endorsements. For a long time, it was more common to see one-offs, like Brittany Spears perfume or One Direction wrapping paper. Nowadays, however, they skip the middle man and go straight into building their own businesses. According to the Los Angeles Times, as of 2023, around 60 percent of celebrity brands had been founded in the last six years, with a hefty percentage of them emerging during or after the pandemic, and these numbers are even higher today.
There is a whole host of products popped out by stars, Cardi B’s vodka whipped cream, for example. Most of the time, however, it’s skincare and makeup. There’s a reason why celebrity brands are so often within the beauty industry, and that sponsorships are so big in the sport industry. They bring a message: wear this makeup and you’ll look like me, or wear these shoes and you’ll perform like me.
An infamous example is Kylie Jenner’s 2015 lip kits, which she credited for her lips suddenly getting bigger at the time. She has since rescinded this and become more transparent about the procedures she’s had done, but it speaks to just how powerful this kind of marketing is; the lip kits sold out immediately on launch, and just four years later, the brand Kylie Cosmetics was valued at $1.2 billion. When celebrities sell beauty products, there’s a layer of trust at play, and a sense of closeness that should not be taken advantage of.
However, it’s not all bad, and there have been times where celebrities utilized their names to challenge industry standards. Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty inclusive foundation shade range was revolutionary at its release in 2017, debuting with 40 shades. Prior to their release, the typical makeup company would only carry a third of that, and people with darker skin tones would typically have to mix multiple different formulas or seek out specialty brands in order to reach the color they needed. It comes as a shock that it took that long for inclusivity to be expected from brands and Rihanna was able to use her influence, money, and star power to make it happen. The impact on the beauty industry was felt so strongly that Fenty Beauty was named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2017.
“I like celebrity brands when they’re authentic, or it feels authentic to their perceived brand by the public, but I think that they kind of fall apart if they’re not,” BHS senior Maddy Kelly said on navigating celebrity brands, “I don’t know if celebrities should necessarily be making brands. I don’t know if I’m hyper-supportive of it.”
It’s clear that the most successful and most positively received celebrity brands seem to be the ones most aligned with that celebrity’s beliefs and who they are. In such an online era, what consumers and fans alike really crave is authenticity, not just branded food or products.