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This year, its fifth in business, Rare Beauty leaned into collaborations for the first time.
It’s not that the brand had never done a partnership. Prior to the summer of 2025, it worked with Glamsquad, created vegan leather pouches with Monse and worked with the Los Angeles Football Club. It even introduced a branded latte with Pantry in Los Angeles to promote its first fragrance launch. But until this August, it hadn’t done much in terms of traditional brand-X-brand collaborations.
In the latter half of 2025, however, it dropped three.
As Rare Beauty matures, partnerships are becoming part of a broader marketing strategy to continue to surprise and delight its most loyal fans while also attracting new ones.
“As the brand grows, our marketing needs to evolve, right? [We’re asking ourselves], ‘How do we continue to reach new clients? [Rare Beauty] is all about feeling good, so how do we continue to make our community feel good?'” said Ashley Murphy, vp of consumer marketing at Rare Beauty. “One of the many ways we do that is through collaborations. Since the very beginning, our community has been sharing ideas of what they want to see from us.”
On August 21, the brand dropped a collaboration with Tajín, the iconic Mexican seasoning blend, which has long been a fixture in its social media posts and a favorite of its famous founder, Selena Gomez. The two brands created a lip and cheek set including a new, limited-edition color of Rare’s bestseller, the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush — the color, called Chamoy, was a deep, red-brown. It also featured Positive Light Luminizing Lip Gloss in the color Clásico, a terracotta with copper and gold shimmer. The $30 set was available on Rare’s e-commerce site and on Sephora.com. It sold out on Sephora.com in 24 hours and on Rare’s DTC site in four days.
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On Tajín launch day, Rare gained 25,000 TikTok followers in less than 24 hours and 61,000 within a week. Launch day for the collaboration marked the brand’s second-highest traffic day on its direct-to-consumer site in 2025, second only to the debut of its first fragrance.
To promote the collab, Rare and Tajín sent 1,000 mailers to influencers across the beauty, lifestyle and food spaces. The mailers included the products, alongside bottles of Tajín and Chamoy, a Mexican condiment.
It was an organic coming-together. “We said, ‘We’re in your content. You’re in our content. All the comments are saying, ‘We need a Rare Beauty-Tajín collab. The color palettes already speak to [each other]. Selena’s already pulling it out of her purse. … Let’s do it!” said Chrystina Woody Train, Rare Beauty’s vp of global brand partnerships. “It all just came together, though we worked on it for over a year.”
According to Luis Alfaro, Tajín USA’s head of marketing, “Working with Rare Beauty felt natural from day one. [Our teams were] united by passion, authenticity and creativity, and, together, we surprised consumers in the most joyful way, blending two worlds that share a love for culture, color and self-expression.” As part of the collaboration, Rare Beauty made a donation to the National School of Ceramics in Mexico, which Tajín also supports through donations.
As Rare Beauty sees it, a good partnership must ladder back to Gomez’s vision for the brand and be authentic to something she would love. “She really does set the tone for every collaboration; it’s either a brand she really likes or legitimately uses, or she sees that there’s a cultural moment,” Woody Train said.
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Collaborations should also provide a moment of joy for the brand’s community, Murphy said.
On September 30, Rare Beauty introduced three water bottles with Bink, known for its silicone-covered glass bottles. Together, the two brands introduced three colorways, each matching a popular Soft Pinch Liquid Blush shade: Grateful, a true red; Happy, a cool pink and a best seller; and Joy, a muted peach. Picking the shades was a collaborative process, Woody Train said. The Bink team had insights on what colors its consumer would be interested in, and together, the two teams made sure the picks were “fun, playful, new and met a consumer demand,” she said.
The bottles were available on Rare’s e-commerce site for $50, or for $70, with the matching blush. The Happy bottle sold out in 24 hours, and Grateful and Joy followed in less than two weeks. The open rate for the email announcing the water bottle collab was 2x its email average. The success proved “we can extend our approach to partnerships and collaborations beyond just products we make,” Woody Train said.
The brands didn’t go big on promotional mailers for this collab. Instead, they invited 46 influencers to a wellness-focused event in Malibu that included a hike, yoga and a sound bath, each providing use-cases for the bottles.
“We admire the Rare Beauty brand not only for their products, but also for their deep connection with their customers and for raising larger conversations around mental health and wellness,” said Bink founder Leslie Green. “We’ve always seen hydration as an important ritual of self-care and part of beauty from the inside out. Being able to bring the best of our two worlds together and have it be received so well by customers was validation in the growing interconnection between beauty, design and self-care.”
Finally, capping its end-of-year flurry of collaborations, on November 3, Gomez’s brand teamed with Shay Mitchell’s luggage brand, Béis, on a collection of three SKUs, each rendered in another Rare Beauty signature hue: a true rose shade called Worth. The collection included the $24 Makeup Brush Pouch, the $74 Large Cosmetic Pouch and a custom design, the $28 Blush Case, engineered specifically to fit Rare’s liquid blush. The collection was available on Béis’s e-commerce site and sold out in four minutes.
Color played a big role in each of the three collaborations, but particularly the latter two. According to Murphy, that’s because “color is so iconic to the brand.”
“We are known for our Soft Pinch Liquid Blush, and there are so many beautiful shades,” she said. “It’s our No. 1 best-selling product, so we want to continue to give our clients what they want. [We’re thinking about] ways to extend Soft Pinch Liquid Blush into different formats and products.”
As for why these partnerships so often lead to sellouts, some scarcity is strategic, Murphy said.
“People love these types of partnerships because they’re limited-edition,” she said. “[There is only one] time you’ll be able to get it, and it’s almost a signal to other community members that, ‘I was part of this community during this time,’ right? ‘I was here during the Béis drop,’ or, ‘I was here for the Tajín kit.’ There’s a collectibility element to it, too.”
Week in review
Collabs of the week
Henry Rose x Crate & Barrel
On Tuesday, Henry Rose, Michelle Pfeiffer’s fragrance brand, introduced its first-ever collaboration: a candle created in partnership with the furniture store Crate & Barrel. The collaboration ties back to Pfeiffer’s new movie, “Oh. What. Fun.,” which will start streaming on Prime Video on December 3. In the film, Pfeiffer attempts to “out-gift” a neighbor with a candle spotted during a hectic trip to Crate & Barrel, Blair Badge, CMO at Henry Rose, told Glossy.
“The Nerida Hearth Candle was created specifically for this collaboration, bridging Michelle’s two worlds of founder and actress while celebrating this soon-to-be iconic holiday scene,” she said. She noted that the collaboration marks the brand’s first major product collaboration and an area Henry Rose intends to further explore as it continues to grow.
“Between the film’s release and Crate & Barrel’s established holiday retail presence, we plan to tap into the film’s momentum and playful storyline with thoughtful social content and curated gifting to fuel awareness beyond the beauty community,” Badge said.
The $80 candle is available on Crate & Barrel’s website and in its stores.
Halfdays x Hoka
Hoka has partnered with Halfdays, the women’s ski apparel brand, on a pair of winter-ready hiking shoes in two colorways: Oat Milk/Spiked Cocoa and Amethyst/Glazed Cherry. The $210 styled dubbed the Kaha 2 Frost Moc GTX Halfdays launched on Friday.
“The Halfdays partnership is centered on celebrating the feminine edge of the outdoors and crafting an uncompromising product that fuses performance and fashion,” Thomas Cykana, Hoka’s senior director of global collaborations and partnerships, told Glossy. In a press release, Ariana Ferwerder, co-founder and CEO of Halfdays said, “Our community has been asking for winter footwear that transitions seamlessly from snow to après. With Hoka, we reimagined the warmth and sculptural feel of our ski jackets into footwear, with technical innovation women can trust in cold-weather conditions.”
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