Rare Beauty Names First Celebrity Ambassador With a Campaign Built Around Story, Not Product

Quick Facts

Rare Beauty named 19-year-old actress Ella Bright its first celebrity ambassador in July 2026, fronting the ‘Made You Blush’ campaign for its Soft Pinch Liquid Blush.
CMO Ashley Murphy says the brand identifies cultural stories first, then matches products to them, executing the Bright campaign in under one month.
The campaign’s Instagram post reached over 9 million views, while the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush accounts for 26.16% of Sephora’s total blush sales.

Rare Beauty has named actress Ella Bright its first celebrity ambassador. The 19-year-old British-American star, who broke out in the series Off Campus, fronts the brand’s ‘Made You Blush’ campaign, built around its Soft Pinch Liquid Blush. The brand went from ideation to launch in under a month.

The campaign concept came directly from an Off Campus scene in which a character dares Bright’s character not to blush. Rare Beauty CMO Ashley Murphy spotted the moment and built the campaign around it. The result is a playful ad where a lineup of suitors attempt to make Bright blush, and fail. Only the Soft Pinch Liquid Blush does the trick.

Story Before Product

Murphy calls the approach ‘story-first.’ The brand looks for existing cultural conversations that align with a product, rather than starting with the product and hunting for a moment to attach it to.

‘We’re very much taking more of a story-first approach, and identifying these stories and existing conversations,’ Murphy said. ‘It’s not about chasing every trend or chasing every new show. It’s more of the story, and what ladders back to what makes us rare and unique at the end of the day.’

Murphy also pointed to the dual-audience pull of the partnership. Off Campus reads as a nostalgia play for millennials who grew up on 1990s rom-coms, while introducing that format to Gen Z. Rare Beauty already over-indexes with both groups.

Why Outside IP Matters

Murphy was direct about the limits of brand-generated content. ‘People are coming onto digital platforms to be entertained,’ she said. ‘This entertaining content is what people want to see from brands, and it reinvigorates the brand story in a way that you can’t always do internally. You kind of need that outside party or IP to create that cultural moment.’

The brand has used this playbook before, with activations tied to The Summer I Turned Pretty and Heated Rivalry. The Bright partnership marks the first time the brand has formalized the relationship into a full ambassador role.

Alongside the campaign, Rare Beauty released a bundle featuring Bright’s favorite products for achieving the rosy look. Selena Gomez, the brand’s founder, was involved in the campaign and her role at the company is unchanged, Murphy confirmed.

A Brand With Product Dominance

The Soft Pinch Liquid Blush sits at the center of the campaign for good reason. According to YipitData, it accounts for 26.16% of Sephora’s total blush sales. In 2024, the brand sold one unit every three seconds across all channels, including TikTok Shop. Sephora’s overall blush category grew 13% that year, a trend Rare Beauty helped ignite when the liquid formula launched in 2020.

The product has accumulated more than 3 million likes and 12,500 reviews on Sephora’s website. When Rare Beauty expanded to Ulta Beauty after its Sephora debut, it broke the retailer’s sales record for a new brand launch.

Brand Trajectory

Rare Beauty’s revenue grew from roughly $350 million in 2023 to more than $500 million in 2024. Fortune valued the brand at $2.5 billion in 2025. The brand recorded 22% year-over-year growth in Media Impact Value during the first half of 2025, at a time when the broader beauty market grew just 0.8% on that same metric.

The Instagram post for the Bright campaign crossed 9 million views as of publication. For operators watching how brands convert entertainment IP into product sales, Rare Beauty’s sub-30-day execution cycle is the number worth tracking.