Selena Gomez has followed Rare Eau de Parfum, the first fragrance under her beauty line, with a second one. Rare Beginnings is out now, and she describes it as a fruity floral, bright and sweet, built on pear nectar, pistachio, gardenia, jasmine, lotus blossom, warm vanilla bean and pink sugar.
The bottle counts as well
Like the first, it uses the packaging Rare Beauty has been developing with hand therapists and packaging engineers: an oversized pump and a twist to lock mechanism, designed so that more people can comfortably open and use the thing. It can also be worn over the brand's Fragrance Layering Balms, which come in Juicy Pear and Sweet Marshmallow.
What the two scents are for
Gomez frames both as markers rather than products, each attached to a specific stretch of her life. The original came out of a pivotal chapter and was about rebuilding confidence across everything at once. Rare Beginnings sits on top of that and goes somewhere lighter, aiming at the charge of a new romance and the sense that something might be about to happen.
Her own use of them divides cleanly. She reaches for the first when she wants something grounding and warm, and she has memories attached to it now precisely because it was the first. Rare Beginnings is the one she has been wearing lately. She could not leave it alone during development, she says, and fell for it again every time she smelled it, and she likes that it opens bright and fresh before settling into a creamy sweetness.
How it was built
Not by picking notes. Gomez says fragrance is emotional for her rather than technical, and a form of self expression, so the brief handed to the master perfumer Jerome Epinette described a feeling instead of listing ingredients. Epinette also worked on Rare Eau de Parfum and on the Find Comfort body collection.
The scent memory underneath it
Asked what takes her back, she goes straight to her grandmother: a large can of Aqua Net and a rosy perfume whose name she never learned. Anything in that register still registers as comfort.
What she does with a morning
She wakes early, usually before the alarm goes off, and guards the quiet stretch before anything starts. It is when she thinks about what the day holds or works through whatever has been sitting on her mind. Her argument is that everybody needs a little of that before the chaos arrives.
What still feels rare
Two things. The private time she gets with family and friends, which she says she has never taken for granted. And being able to make products that leave the people using them feeling seen, which is why she treats what the community says back as part of the process rather than a report at the end of it.
On this launch, the first verdicts came from her friends, who have turned into an unofficial testing panel. What they told her was that it reads fresh, warm and bright, and that it lasts the day.