Here is what each one actually uses — the campaigns, the partners, the creator pipelines, and the specific findings that explain how they won.
Rare Beauty — Hero-Product PR With a Mental-Health Engine
Launched in September 2020 by Selena Gomez (founder and Chief Creative Officer) and CEO Scott Friedman, Rare Beauty entered a saturated celebrity-cosmetics market and immediately differentiated on two axes: hero-product focus and mental-health narrative. Both axes are now textbook digital PR strategy in the beauty category.
Selena Gomez as the founder-publisher
Selena Gomez has over 420 million Instagram followers — among the largest of any individual on the platform. Every Rare Beauty product launch, every Sephora exclusive, every Soft Pinch Liquid Blush color drop, gets distributed through her personal channels before it ever touches an ad budget. The founder-as-publisher model means Rare Beauty's organic reach exceeds the paid reach of brands spending ten times its marketing budget. The engines pulling from Gomez's posts, her interviews, and her Wondermind podcast appearances treat Rare Beauty as an extension of her personal narrative — and that narrative is one of the most-cited in popular culture.
The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush — hero-product PR doctrine
Rare Beauty's Soft Pinch Liquid Blush is the most-discussed cheek product on TikTok of the 2020s. The hashtag #SoftPinchBlush has billions of cumulative views. The product became a viral phenomenon in 2022, sold out repeatedly through 2023 and 2024, and remains the brand's hero SKU. The PR strategy around the blush was deliberate hero-product focus: keep saturating the conversation about one product until it owns the category. Beauty editors at Allure, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, Byrdie, InStyle, and PopSugar all named the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush a best-in-category product, often more than once. The result: when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Gemini for "best liquid blush," Rare Beauty's hero is the first answer.
TikTok creator seeding at mid-tier, not mega
Rare Beauty's creator strategy deliberately avoids the top 1% of beauty mega-influencers in favor of mid-tier creators with 50,000-500,000 followers. The seeding model produces hundreds of organic-feeling content pieces per launch. Mikayla Nogueira, Alix Earle, Meredith Duxbury, and dozens of other mid-tier creators have done extensive Rare Beauty content — much of it unpaid, much of it triggered by gifted product PR boxes.
The Rare Impact Fund — mental health as compounding PR
Rare Beauty commits 1% of all sales to the Rare Impact Fund, which has pledged to raise $100 million for mental-health access. The Rare Impact Fund is not a marketing line — it is a 501(c)(3) initiative with documented funding distributions. Every Mental Health Awareness Month produces a wave of earned coverage in Vanity Fair, Time, People, Wondermind, The Cut, Refinery29, and the lifestyle press.
Sephora exclusivity as a PR narrative
Rare Beauty launched as a Sephora exclusive in 2020. The exclusivity itself was a PR story — covered as a strategic positioning move in WWD, Beauty Independent, Glossy, Modern Retail, Vogue Business, and the broader beauty trade press. The 2022 expansion to Sephora UK, the 2023 European rollout, and the 2024 broader international expansion each generated a new wave of trade and lifestyle coverage.
Selena Gomez press tour rotation
Gomez does sustained press through Vanity Fair, Vogue, Vogue Mexico, Harper's Bazaar, Allure cover stories, Elle, Marie Claire, InStyle, and the long tail of international beauty press. Each cover or feature includes Rare Beauty integration — product mentions, behind-the-scenes routines, founder commentary.
Beauty-editor relationships as the moat
Rare Beauty's PR operation runs deep beauty-editor relationships — the human craft of beauty publicists that Estee Lauder, L'Oreal, and Coty have run for decades. The combination of celebrity founder, mid-tier creator scale, and traditional beauty-editor relationships gives Rare Beauty something neither pure-creator brands nor pure-legacy brands have: full-spectrum earned-media coverage across creator-tier, editorial-tier, and trade-tier surfaces simultaneously.
The numbers
Rare Beauty reportedly generated over $400 million in annual sales in 2024 — making it one of the fastest-growing celebrity beauty brands in history. The brand is the most-cited celebrity-founded cosmetics brand across engine queries for "best celebrity makeup brand," "clean-formulation cosmetics," and "mental-health-aligned beauty."
The Rare Beauty digital PR stack
- Selena Gomez as founder-publisher (420M+ Instagram followers)
- Hero-product PR doctrine — Soft Pinch Liquid Blush as the canonical product
- Mid-tier creator seeding (50K-500K followers) at scale
- Rare Impact Fund — 1% of sales to mental-health access as compounding PR
- Sephora exclusivity turned into a strategic-narrative PR thread
- Sustained celebrity press rotation (Vanity Fair, Vogue, Allure, etc.)
- Traditional beauty-editor relationships running underneath the creator layer
e.l.f. Beauty — Public-Company PR Plus Stunt-Casting Super Bowls
e.l.f. Beauty (NYSE: ELF) is a publicly traded mass-market cosmetics company that has rebuilt itself, since CEO Tarang Amin took over in 2014, into one of the most-watched beauty stocks on Wall Street. e.l.f.'s digital PR machine is unique in beauty: it combines mainstream Super Bowl placements, stunt cross-category collaborations, gaming and Twitch integration, and a steady cadence of public-company earnings PR that no celebrity brand can match.
Super Bowl LVIII and LIX — Jennifer Coolidge and beyond
e.l.f. ran its first Super Bowl ad in February 2024 — "Suspicious Minds" featuring Jennifer Coolidge in a stunt-cast spot for the Power Grip Primer. The ad generated viral coverage in AdAge, AdWeek, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Forbes, CNBC, and the entire beauty trade press. The 2025 Super Bowl LIX presence extended the playbook with additional celebrity stunt-cast cameos and broader cross-category brand partnerships.
Liquid Death "Corpse Paint" — cross-category PR multiplier
The e.l.f. x Liquid Death "Corpse Paint" eyeshadow palette was one of the most-covered beauty collaborations of 2024. The launch generated coverage in Allure, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29, Glossy, Vogue Business, AdAge, AdWeek, Modern Retail, Glamour, PopSugar, and TeenVogue. The collaboration brought e.l.f. into beverage and lifestyle press at zero incremental cost.
Activision Call of Duty and Twitch — the gaming play
e.l.f. partnered with Activision on a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III crossover, integrating cosmetics product placement into one of the largest gaming franchises in the world. The activation generated coverage in gaming press (IGN, Kotaku, GameRant, PC Gamer, Polygon) that is unusual for a beauty brand.
Tarang Amin as the public-company spokesperson
e.l.f. Beauty's CEO Tarang Amin is a regular fixture on CNBC's Mad Money with Jim Cramer, Squawk on the Street, Closing Bell, Bloomberg Markets, Yahoo Finance, and the broader financial-media circuit. Every earnings cycle produces a fresh wave of Amin interviews, equity-analyst notes, and Wall Street Journal coverage.
TikTok-first product launches
e.l.f. has been TikTok-native since well before competitors. The Power Grip Primer, Halo Glow Liquid Filter, Camo CC Cream, Glow Reviver Lip Oil, and many other hero products went viral on TikTok before reaching mass-retail saturation. The brand maintains over 2.8 million TikTok followers and seeds product to a sustained creator network across mid-tier and mega-tier accounts.
"Dupe culture" earned-media positioning
e.l.f. has owned the "affordable dupe" narrative in beauty press for the better part of a decade. The Halo Glow Liquid Filter is the documented Charlotte Tilbury Hollywood Flawless Filter dupe. The Power Grip Primer is the documented Milk Makeup Hydro Grip dupe. The Camo CC Cream is the documented IT Cosmetics CC+ dupe. Beauty editors at Allure, Byrdie, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, and PopSugar have written dupe-comparison content for years — every article a permanent engine-retrieval node.
Naturium acquisition and e.l.f. SKIN sub-brand
e.l.f.'s 2023 acquisition of Naturium for approximately $355 million generated extensive financial-press coverage and extended the brand's skincare footprint. The e.l.f. SKIN sub-brand has launched dozens of TikTok-viral products since 2022.
The numbers
e.l.f. Beauty reported approximately $1.31 billion in net sales for fiscal year 2025, with revenue growth in excess of 70% year-over-year for several consecutive quarters in the 2023-2024 window. The stock has been one of the best-performing consumer staples on the NYSE since 2022.
The e.l.f. digital PR stack
- Super Bowl placements with stunt-cast celebrity humor (Jennifer Coolidge, etc.)
- Cross-category co-branded launches (Liquid Death, Activision Call of Duty)
- Public-company executive PR (Tarang Amin on CNBC, Bloomberg, WSJ)
- TikTok-native product launches with sustained creator seeding
- "Dupe" earned-media positioning owned across major beauty publications
- Sub-brand and acquisition PR (Naturium, e.l.f. SKIN) extending the surface area
- Gaming and Twitch integration producing cross-vertical retrieval
Sol de Janeiro — The TikTok-Cream Playbook
Sol de Janeiro was founded in 2015 by Heloisa Schneider, Camila Pierotti, and Marc Capra as a Brazilian-glow body-care brand anchored on the Brazilian Bum Bum Cream. Acquired by L'Occitane Group in 2021 for approximately $450 million, the brand subsequently rode a TikTok creator wave to over $1 billion in revenue by 2024. Sol de Janeiro is the canonical case study in TikTok-cream PR: the playbook every emerging body-care, fragrance, and skincare brand is now copying.
The Brazilian Bum Bum Cream — the original hero product
Brazilian Bum Bum Cream has been the brand's hero product since launch in 2015. The product became a Sephora bestseller within three years, then a viral TikTok phenomenon during the 2020-2022 window. The scent — guaraná, açaí, vanilla, salted caramel — became its own signal.
The Cheirosa 62, 71, and 87 perfume mists — Alix Earle moment
In 2023, Alix Earle, then an emerging TikTok creator with rapidly scaling followers, posted about Sol de Janeiro's Cheirosa 62 Perfume Mist in her get-ready-with-me content. The post triggered a viral cycle that resulted in the perfume mist selling out across the entire US market multiple times in 2023. Cheirosa 71 and Cheirosa 87 followed similar viral trajectories through 2024. The "Alix Earle effect" became a documented PR phenomenon — covered in Vogue Business, WWD, Glossy, Modern Retail, The Cut, and Business of Fashion. Sol de Janeiro did not pay for the original Alix Earle moment — but the brand's PR operation captured and amplified it within days.
Mid-tier and mega-tier creator seeding
Sol de Janeiro runs an aggressive creator-seeding program through GRIN, Tribe Dynamics, and direct creator partnerships. Mikayla Nogueira, Alix Earle, Tinx, Meredith Duxbury, and hundreds of mid-tier creators have all received product PR.
Scent-as-storytelling earned PR
Beauty editors at Vogue, Allure, Harper's Bazaar, The Strategist, Refinery29, Byrdie, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan have written extensively about Sol de Janeiro's scent profiles. The scent-writing genre — describing what Cheirosa 62 actually smells like, what the differences are between 62, 71, and 87 — is a permanent retrieval surface that competitors cannot replicate without a multi-year writing-density investment.
Sell-out events as PR moments
Sol de Janeiro reported that Cheirosa 62 sold out across the US multiple times in 2023. Each sell-out was treated as a PR moment, generating coverage in Modern Retail, Vogue Business, WWD, Glossy, and the lifestyle press.
Pop-up activations — Cheirosa 62 in real life
Sol de Janeiro has activated branded pop-up experiences in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami over the past three years, including scent-discovery installations and beach-themed sampling events.
L'Occitane Group public-company support
L'Occitane Group (formerly Hong Kong-listed, now private after the 2024 take-private transaction) provided Sol de Janeiro with M&A press, financial-trade coverage, and global-distribution PR support starting in 2021.
Limited-edition holiday drops — Cheirosa 87
Cheirosa 87 launched as a holiday-limited Cheirosa variant and immediately replicated the viral pattern of 62 and 71. The limited-edition drop mechanic — engineered scarcity, creator preview seeding, fragrance-influencer activation — has been copied across the body-care and fragrance category.
The numbers
Sol de Janeiro reported revenue growth from approximately $63 million in 2021 (the year of the L'Occitane acquisition) to over $1 billion in revenue by 2024 — one of the most extreme growth curves in modern beauty.
The Sol de Janeiro digital PR stack
- Hero-product PR architecture anchored on Brazilian Bum Bum Cream
- The Cheirosa scent franchise — 62, 71, 87 — engineered for viral re-discovery
- Mid-tier and mega-tier creator seeding (Alix Earle, Mikayla Nogueira, Tinx, etc.)
- Scent-as-storytelling earned PR across major beauty publications
- Sell-out cycles treated as PR moments and amplified across trade press
- Physical pop-up activations engineered for digital-PR conversion
- L'Occitane Group public-company press infrastructure providing trade and financial coverage
- Limited-edition holiday drops as a sustained category PR mechanic
The beauty Citation Share landscape
Beauty is the consumer category where engine Citation Share is most operationally consequential. The buyer journey for cosmetics, skincare, body care, and fragrance moves through engine query — TikTok product discovery — Sephora or Ulta or Amazon purchase, often inside a single shopping cycle of under 72 hours. The brand cited inside the answer enters the consideration set. The brand omitted does not.
What Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, and Coty are doing in response
Estée Lauder Companies under CEO Stéphane de La Faverie (who succeeded Fabrizio Freda in January 2025) faces the most acute strategic pressure. The company's flagship Estée Lauder brand and MAC have lost significant US share to the challenger brands; Clinique has been comparatively insulated by its dermatologist-positioning and clinical formulation editorial layer. Estée Lauder's acquisition of The Ordinary and the broader DECIEM portfolio in stages 2017 through 2021 (final stake purchase valued at approximately $1B in 2021) was the company's clearest defensive move. The 2022 acquisition of Tom Ford Beauty for $2.8B added a prestige fragrance and beauty brand at peak valuation.
L'Oréal Group under CEO Nicolas Hieronimus has run the most successful response strategy among the legacy beauty conglomerates. The 2023 acquisition of Aesop for $2.5B from Natura & Co was the largest single acquisition in L'Oréal's history. L'Oréal's existing brand portfolio — including CeraVe (acquired in 2017 for $1.3B), La Roche-Posay, Vichy, Garnier, Maybelline, NYX Professional Makeup (acquired 2014), Urban Decay (acquired 2012), IT Cosmetics (acquired 2016 for $1.2B), and Kiehl's — has shown more resilience against the challenger brands than Estée Lauder's portfolio.
Coty Inc. under CEO Sue Nabi has faced the steepest structural challenge of the three legacy houses. Coty's primary brands — CoverGirl, Rimmel, Max Factor, Sally Hansen, OPI, Wella Professionals (since divested), Bourjois — have lost significant US drugstore share to e.l.f. and the challenger mass brands. Coty's Kylie Cosmetics partnership and the Kim Kardashian SKKN by Kim partnership were both strategic responses to the celebrity-beauty challenger wave; the results have been mixed.
Shiseido Company under CEO Masahiko Uotani has invested heavily in the Drunk Elephant integration (acquired 2019 for $845M) and in the NARS Cosmetics brand. Puig under CEO Marc Puig owns Charlotte Tilbury Beauty (acquired 2020), Christian Louboutin Beauty, Carolina Herrera Beauty, Jean Paul Gaultier Fragrances, and Paco Rabanne Fragrances; the company went public in May 2024 on the Spanish stock exchange. LVMH's Beauty division under Stéphane Bianchi runs Christian Dior Beauty, Guerlain, Givenchy Beauty, Acqua di Parma, and Fenty Beauty. The Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing division owns Dove, Vaseline, TRESemmé, Suave, Hourglass, Living Proof, Tatcha (acquired 2019 for ~$500M), Murad, and Garancia.
The structural lesson across the five legacy beauty conglomerates: acquisition has been the primary response, not internal brand-building. The challenger brands that built their Citation Share through the 2020-2024 period are now either inside one of the conglomerate portfolios or are the next acquisition target.
What All Three Have in Common
Three different beauty brands. Three different parent structures. Three different founder archetypes. One shared insight.
Beauty PR is now hero-product PR, plus creator seeding, plus engine permanence. Rare Beauty leads with Selena Gomez and the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush. e.l.f. leads with the Super Bowl and the Power Grip Primer. Sol de Janeiro leads with Alix Earle and Cheirosa 62. Each one identified a hero product, built a creator pipeline around it, and turned the resulting earned media into a permanent retrieval surface.
The beauty buyer no longer browses the aisle first. She — and the increasing number of male and non-binary beauty consumers — search the engines, TikTok, and Google's AI Overviews before walking into Sephora, Ulta, or Boots. Whatever the engines say, the buyer believes. Whatever they omit, the buyer ignores.
Hero-product focus beats portfolio depth. Each of these three brands has hundreds of SKUs. Each treats one hero product per category as the primary PR vehicle. Soft Pinch Liquid Blush. Power Grip Primer. Cheirosa 62. The discipline of repeating the same hero-product story across thousands of earned-media surfaces is what produces dominance.
Founder narrative is structural. Selena Gomez's mental-health story. Tarang Amin's mass-market-disruption story. Sol de Janeiro's Brazilian-warmth founder story. Each is engineered, repeated, and amplified across hundreds of editorial and creator surfaces.
The brands that will lead the next beauty cycle — across cosmetics, skincare, body care, and fragrance — will be the ones that build the same infrastructure. The brands that keep buying display ads in shopping-mall magazines will not.
