Note: This article is based on publicly available reporting, brand materials, and industry analysis about Rare Beauty, Substack, beauty marketing, creator-led newsletters, and community-driven brand strategy.
Rare Beauty has already conquered the makeup bag, the bathroom counter, the “just one more blush shade” section of TikTok, and probably a few emotionally vulnerable group chats. Now, Selena Gomez’s beauty brand is doing something that feels both very 2026 and strangely old-school: it is writing a newsletter. Not a sterile corporate email with a coupon code screaming in all caps. Not a “Dear valued customer” update that reads like it was written by a scented candle with a law degree. Rare Beauty is publishing on Substack, and the voice behind it is an “anonymous insider” known as Rare Insider.
The newsletter, Rare Beauty Secrets, promises a semi-authorized look behind the scenes at one of beauty’s most talked-about brands. That phrase alone is deliciously mischievous. “Semi-authorized” sounds like someone got permission, but only after winking at legal. The concept is simple: pull back the curtain on product development, team culture, makeup artistry, mental health conversations, and the tiny details that never fit neatly into a TikTok caption.
But there is more happening here than a cute newsletter experiment. Rare Beauty’s Substack strategy says a lot about where beauty marketing is going. Consumers are tired of being yelled at by algorithms. Brands are tired of trying to explain complicated stories in seven seconds. And somewhere between “watch me apply blush in a moving car” and “here is a 48-slide deck on brand purpose,” Substack has become a surprisingly cozy middle ground.
What Is Rare Beauty Secrets?
Rare Beauty Secrets is Rare Beauty’s branded Substack newsletter, launched as a more intimate editorial space for fans, beauty lovers, and curious readers who want to understand what happens behind the products. The newsletter is written under the byline Rare Insider, a persona associated with MacKenzie Kassab, Rare Beauty’s director of creative strategy. Rather than centering the newsletter on one employee’s personal fame, the byline frames the writer as a community representative: someone who asks questions, wanders into the right offices, gathers the good gossip, and reports back with the kind of detail that makes readers feel like they have a VIP badge.
The content is intentionally different from Rare Beauty’s Instagram, TikTok, and traditional marketing emails. Instead of quick product pushes, the newsletter explores topics such as how a blush is developed, what happens on a campaign set, how team members think about beauty, and how the brand’s broader mental health mission shows up in everyday work. It is not “Buy this immediately or your face will file a complaint.” It is closer to: “Here is the story behind this product, the people who made it, and why it exists.”
Why the “Anonymous Insider” Angle Works
The anonymous-insider concept gives Rare Beauty something many beauty brands secretly crave: permission to be playful without becoming messy. In beauty, “insider” language has always been powerful. People want to know what makeup artists really use, what product developers are testing, which shades almost did not make the cut, and whether a founder’s office actually looks like a Pinterest board had a private driver.
By using Rare Insider, Rare Beauty creates a voice that feels close to the action but not overly polished. It is not anonymous in a scandalous, trench-coat-in-a-parking-garage way. It is anonymous in a “your friend who works there finally made a newsletter” way. That distinction matters. The tone suggests access, but it does not pretend to be a whistleblower account. This is not corporate espionage in lip gloss. It is brand storytelling with a little wink.
The move also helps Rare Beauty avoid one of the biggest problems with founder-led brands: over-reliance on the celebrity founder. Selena Gomez remains central to Rare Beauty’s identity, values, and emotional appeal, but she does not need to personally write every post for the brand to feel authentic. Rare Insider allows the company to broaden the story beyond Selena while still reflecting the ethos she established: self-acceptance, emotional honesty, inclusivity, and beauty that feels human rather than airbrushed into another dimension.
Rare Beauty’s Bigger Brand Story
Rare Beauty launched in 2020 with a clear mission: challenge unrealistic beauty standards and make makeup feel accessible, expressive, and emotionally supportive rather than intimidating. Its products are known for easy-to-use textures, high-impact color, and packaging designed with accessibility in mind. The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush became a viral hero product, proving that one tiny dot can either give you a healthy flush or make you look like you lost a fight with a strawberry smoothie, depending on your blending discipline.
Beyond products, Rare Beauty has built much of its identity around mental health. Through the Rare Impact Fund, the brand donates one percent of sales to support mental health resources and services, especially for young people. This mission gives the brand a deeper storytelling well than many beauty competitors. Rare Beauty is not only selling blush, foundation, lip oils, and highlighters; it is selling a worldview in which beauty and emotional well-being are allowed to sit at the same table.
That is exactly why Substack makes sense. A mission-heavy brand needs room to explain itself. Social media can create awareness, but it often flattens nuance. A newsletter can slow the conversation down. It can connect a product launch to a real person, a mental health campaign to a lived experience, or a shade range decision to the work of product teams and makeup artists.
Why Substack Instead of Another Brand Blog?
At first glance, a beauty brand on Substack sounds unexpected. Substack built its reputation around independent writers, journalists, cultural critics, niche experts, and creators who wanted a direct relationship with readers. A celebrity-founded cosmetics company showing up there could feel like a famous person walking into a tiny coffee shop and asking where the ring light is.
But the platform has evolved. Substack is no longer just a newsletter tool. It includes discovery features, comments, Notes, chat, video, podcasting, and a social layer that encourages conversation. For brands, that means Substack can function as an owned-media channel with community features baked in. It offers the intimacy of email, the discoverability of a platform, and the editorial flexibility of a blog without forcing the brand to build everything from scratch.
Rare Beauty appears to understand that the opportunity is not simply “send more emails.” Everyone already has too many emails. Some inboxes look like a raccoon got trapped inside a digital filing cabinet. The real opportunity is to create something readers voluntarily make space for because it feels useful, interesting, and emotionally aligned with why they liked the brand in the first place.
The Content Strategy: Less Hard Sell, More Soft Power
The smartest part of Rare Beauty’s Substack strategy is that it does not treat every post like a product page wearing a fake mustache. Instead, the newsletter uses editorial storytelling. A product may appear, but it is not always the entire point. Readers might learn how a blush formula came together, what inspired a campaign, or how a team member thinks about confidence and self-expression.
This approach builds what marketers love to call “brand affinity,” which is a fancy way of saying people start liking you for reasons beyond the thing you sell. In beauty, that is powerful. Products can be copied. Shades can be duplicated. Packaging trends come and go. But a community that feels emotionally connected to a brand is harder to knock off.
Rare Beauty also uses feedback from readers to shape future content. Questions from social comments, TikTok replies, Sephora reviews, and Substack conversations can become editorial prompts. That creates a loop: the community asks, the insider investigates, the newsletter answers, and readers feel heard. It is not revolutionary in theory, but many brands still behave like customer feedback is a haunted attic they visit once a quarter. Rare Beauty is making that feedback part of the storytelling engine.
The Business Strategy Hiding Under the Blush
Make no mistake: this is still a business move. A warm, charming, community-first business move, but a business move nonetheless. Rare Beauty has grown into one of the strongest celebrity beauty brands in the market, with major retail partnerships and a devoted Gen Z and millennial audience. Its expansion into Ulta Beauty in 2026 put the brand in more than 1,500 additional stores, dramatically increasing its physical reach beyond Sephora and RareBeauty.com.
As a brand gets bigger, it faces a classic problem: scale can make intimacy harder. The larger the audience, the more generic the messaging can become. Substack gives Rare Beauty a way to preserve closeness while growing. It lets the brand speak to superfans in a more thoughtful format, test what stories resonate, and build a record of community engagement that is not entirely dependent on social platforms.
That last point is important. Algorithms change. Organic reach rises and falls. TikTok trends have the life span of an avocado. Email and newsletter subscribers, while not perfectly owned in every technical sense, represent a more direct relationship than a rented social feed. For a brand thinking long-term, that relationship is valuable.
Why Beauty Brands Are Suddenly Acting Like Media Companies
Rare Beauty is part of a broader movement: brands are becoming publishers. Not in the old “we started a blog in 2013 and posted twice about office snacks” way. Modern brand publishing is more personality-driven, more editorial, and more community-aware. Beauty brands especially have a natural advantage because their products already live inside routines, emotions, identities, and personal rituals.
A lipstick is rarely just a lipstick. It can be a first-date confidence charm, a five-minute mood reset, a work presentation shield, or the thing you apply before telling yourself, “We are absolutely not texting him.” Beauty content works best when it understands that emotional context. Substack gives brands space to write into those moments instead of only showcasing swatches and product claims.
Rare Beauty’s move also reflects a larger shift away from purely performance-driven marketing. For years, brands chased clicks, conversions, and trackable short-term wins. Those metrics still matter, of course; no CFO wants to hear that vibes alone paid the warehouse lease. But the smartest consumer brands are realizing that emotional loyalty, cultural relevance, and community trust are also growth assets.
The Risks: When Brands Enter Cozy Spaces
Of course, there is a risk. Whenever brands enter a platform known for personal voices, readers become wary. Nobody wants Substack to turn into a mall kiosk where every newsletter asks if you have heard about the new serum. If every beauty company launches an “insider” newsletter with the same soft-focus photos, vague empowerment language, and “we are obsessed” captions, reader fatigue will arrive wearing comfortable shoes.
Rare Beauty’s advantage is that its Substack appears connected to real brand behavior. The company already has a strong voice, a mental health mission, a founder with cultural credibility, and a community that asks detailed questions. The newsletter is not being forced onto the brand like a cowboy hat at a bachelorette party. It fits because Rare Beauty has stories that need space.
Still, the brand has to keep earning attention. The insider voice must stay specific. The posts must reveal something readers could not get from an Instagram carousel. The newsletter has to remain useful, charming, and occasionally surprising. Otherwise, “semi-authorized behind-the-scenes access” can quickly become “please enjoy this lightly reheated press release.” Nobody subscribes for reheated press release. Not even your aunt, and she signs up for everything.
What Marketers Can Learn From Rare Beauty’s Substack
1. Pick a platform because it solves a problem
Rare Beauty did not seem to choose Substack just because it was shiny. The brand had too many stories for short-form social media and needed a place where readers were willing to spend time. That is the correct order: problem first, platform second. Chasing platforms without a clear purpose is how brands end up dancing awkwardly on apps where their audience only wanted a coupon.
2. Create a voice that matches the channel
The Rare Insider persona works because Substack rewards personality. A standard corporate voice would feel painfully out of place. The best branded newsletters sound like they were written by a person with taste, curiosity, and access, not a committee that has strong feelings about semicolons.
3. Make community questions part of the editorial calendar
Rare Beauty’s use of reader feedback is a reminder that content ideas do not always need to come from a brainstorm room. Customers are already telling brands what they want to know. The trick is to listen carefully, answer generously, and turn curiosity into content.
4. Do not measure everything like a flash sale
Substack may influence sales, but Rare Beauty’s approach suggests that engagement, comments, sentiment, and audience growth are also meaningful indicators. Some channels are better at building trust than producing instant revenue spikes. That does not make them fluffy. It makes them long-term.
5. Be useful beyond the product
The strongest beauty content helps people understand themselves, their routines, or the culture around them. Rare Beauty can talk about blush, but it can also talk about confidence, disappointment, friendship, creativity, and mental health. That range gives the newsletter room to breathe.
Specific Examples of Content That Fits the Rare Beauty Formula
A great Rare Beauty Substack post might explain how a new blush shade travels from inspiration board to lab sample to campaign shoot. Another could follow a global artistry director through a day on set, showing how lighting, skin prep, and last-minute decisions shape the final look. Another could spotlight someone from the Rare Impact team discussing why mental health conversations belong in beauty spaces.
The key is that each story should offer access. Readers should leave feeling like they learned something they could not have gotten from a product listing. For example, a post about foundation shade development should not merely say, “We made many shades.” It should explain what undertones were considered, how testers responded, what challenges came up, and why inclusivity is operational work, not just a campaign slogan.
Similarly, a post about Selena Gomez’s influence should not rely only on celebrity glow. It should explain how her values shape product names, campaign tone, packaging decisions, or mental health initiatives. The celebrity connection may attract attention, but the brand’s internal consistency keeps people reading.
Why Readers Respond to This Kind of Beauty Content
Beauty consumers have become extremely sophisticated. They know when they are being marketed to. They can identify a sponsored post by the second sentence. They understand shade ranges, ingredient claims, packaging choices, influencer trips, and the difference between a real review and a suspiciously enthusiastic caption written by someone who has never met a pore.
That sophistication means brands need to work harder to build trust. Rare Beauty’s Substack works because it treats readers as curious adults, not passive shoppers. It invites them into the process. It says, “Here is how this came together,” rather than “Here is a product, please clap.”
For Gen Z and millennial audiences especially, brand trust often comes from transparency, values, and relatability. They want brands to stand for something, but they also have strong radar for empty purpose marketing. Rare Beauty has an advantage because its mental health mission has been part of the brand from the beginning, not stapled on after a workshop called “Authenticity 2.0.”
The Future of Rare Beauty on Substack
The most interesting possibility for Rare Beauty Secrets is that it could become more than a newsletter. With Substack’s community tools, Rare Beauty can host conversations, share spontaneous updates, test video, feature guest voices, and create ongoing dialogue with readers. The newsletter could become a living editorial hub where product, purpose, culture, and community overlap.
Guest posts would be especially powerful. Imagine makeup artists explaining how they build looks for different skin types, product developers answering reader questions, mental health partners sharing practical resources, or team members writing about career paths in beauty. These stories would expand the brand world without making every post depend on a product launch.
The challenge will be maintaining the insider feeling as the platform grows. Once something becomes too polished, it loses the charm that made people subscribe. Rare Beauty should keep the occasional odd detail, candid observation, and “I went to ask the person who knows” energy. In other words, keep the tea hot, but do not turn it into a quarterly earnings beverage.
Conclusion: Rare Beauty Is Selling Trust, Not Just Tint
Rare Beauty’s “anonymous insider” Substack is more than a clever content experiment. It is a sign of how modern beauty brands are rethinking the relationship between storytelling, community, and commerce. In a noisy digital landscape, Rare Beauty is betting that some fans still want to read, reflect, comment, and feel closer to the people behind the products they love.
The strategy works because it fits the brand. Rare Beauty has a founder whose public identity is tied to openness, a mission rooted in mental health, products with passionate fans, and a community that wants more than a checkout link. Substack gives the brand a softer, deeper, more conversational space to bring those pieces together.
Not every brand needs a Substack. In fact, some absolutely should not start one unless they have something better to say than “new drop, besties.” But Rare Beauty’s approach offers a useful blueprint: be specific, be human, listen to your audience, and let the people behind the brand step into the light. The anonymous insider may be the hook, but the real secret is simpler: people still love a good story, especially when it comes with blush.
Experience & Practical Takeaways: What Rare Beauty’s Substack Teaches Anyone Building a Brand
From a content strategy perspective, Rare Beauty’s Substack feels like the kind of move many brands talk about in meetings but few actually execute well. Everyone says they want “community.” Everyone says they want “authenticity.” Then the final content often sounds like it was assembled from leftover LinkedIn posts and approved by seven people named Brad. Rare Beauty’s newsletter stands out because it understands that intimacy is not created by using casual punctuation. It is created by sharing details that feel real.
One practical lesson is that behind-the-scenes content only works when there is an actual behind the scenes. Readers can tell the difference between meaningful access and decorative access. A photo of a conference room is not a story. But a product developer explaining why a formula took several rounds to perfect, or a creative strategist asking the product team questions from real fans, gives readers something to hold onto. That is useful for beauty brands, fashion labels, wellness companies, and even B2B businesses that think they are too boring for storytelling. Spoiler: you are probably not boring; you are probably explaining yourself badly.
Another experience-based takeaway is that the best newsletters make readers feel slightly smarter, slightly closer, or slightly more seen. Rare Beauty has a chance to do all three. A reader can learn how a blush is made, feel closer to the brand team, and see their own questions reflected in the content. That combination is powerful because it turns passive followers into active participants. When people feel included in the conversation, they are more likely to keep reading, commenting, sharing, and eventually buyingnot because they were aggressively pushed, but because the brand earned attention over time.
For marketers, the temptation will be to copy the surface: launch a Substack, invent an insider name, write in a chatty tone, and call it a day. That misses the point. Rare Beauty’s move works because the channel matches the brand’s deeper identity. The insider voice fits a company built around self-expression, emotional openness, and community. A financial software company could use a similar strategy, but it would need a different voice, different stories, and a different reason for existing. Copy the principle, not the costume.
The final lesson is patience. A newsletter is not a vending machine where you insert three posts and receive brand loyalty. It is closer to hosting a dinner party every week. You need a reason for people to show up, a tone that makes them comfortable, and enough substance that they do not leave thinking, “Well, that could have been an ad.” Rare Beauty’s “anonymous insider” has opened the door. The next challenge is keeping the room interesting.
