Fenty Beauty Is Ready for Its Next Era, and It Starts With Foundation

Rihanna with Fenty Beauty products displayed in the background — Getty Images / Courtesy / Byrdie

Killing your best-known product isn’t exactly standard beauty-brand behavior. Brands extend, refresh, and even slap “new and improved” on a box. What they generally don’t do is take the product that made them famous, discontinue it, and start over from scratch.

But that’s exactly what Fenty Beauty is doing. On September 4, the 9-year-old brand released its Pro Filt’r Fluid Flex Natural Matte Longwear Foundation in 50 all-new shades with an all-new numbering system, roughly three years and 30-plus prototypes in the making—and the Soft Matte formula that launched the brand in 2017 is on its way out.

The Fenty We Knew

When Fenty launched with 40 foundation shades, at a time when half that was considered generous, the rest of the industry quickly realized the bar was raised. “When Fenty Beauty entered the market in 2017, it didn’t just launch another celebrity beauty brand,” says Danika Berry, beauty strategist and founder of Black Beauty Founders. “It changed the standard for what consumers expected from the industry.”

But the real innovation wasn’t simply the number of shades—it was the range. A 2018 analysis by The Pudding, which measured the lightness value of every shade sold by a dozen brands, found that Fenty covered the lightest and darkest ends of the spectrum particularly well, while other U.S. bestsellers skewed lighter. In short, Fenty wasn’t just adding more bottles to the lineup; it was making room for people who had historically been left out. Beauty writer and expert Stixx Mathews puts it plainly: “When Fenty launched, they understood that there was no one way to have an undertone and that subtones are actually a thing.” Before that, he says, “It was just one tone, one shade, one person.”

And the reason it worked wasn’t complicated. “Fenty proved something that the industry should have already known, which is that Black and brown consumers were never a niche market,” Berry says. “They were major beauty consumers who had been underserved for years.”

Rihanna poses at an event and takes a photo with a fan — Getty Images / Byrdie

Why Fenty Is Starting Over Now

When Fenty’s Soft Matte foundation launched, it undeniably disrupted the beauty industry. But somewhere down the line, that same foundation reached a turning point. According to Roshini Greenwald, Fenty’s GM and SVP of North America, the brand kept hearing the same feedback again and again: the original felt heavy, ran warm on a lot of skin tones, and made neutral undertones hard to find. The most telling feedback, though, was about when people were actually wearing it.

“What we were hearing specifically about our original foundation was that it had started to become a bit of a special occasion foundation,” Greenwald said. “We know now that [our customers] want something that’s much more flexible.”

Nanette Wong, Fenty’s head of global marketing, puts the shift in the context of beauty’s changing tastes. “Back in the day, we had the 2016 Instagram beauty era, and that was pretty consistent, but now [our consumers] want more modern minimalism,” she says. “As we level up, it was important that we created a product that really adapted to people’s lifestyles and needs.”

Leilah Mundt, founder and CEO of Crème Collective, agrees. “Everyone’s craving realness. They want to see real texture in skin,” she says. “Our eyeballs are getting sick of [the filters].”

The new range still lands at 50 shades, but Fenty is very clear that the number itself isn’t the point—and it never was. “It was never about a number of shades, although that’s what the industry latched onto at the time,” Greenwald says. “We do still have 50 [shades], but that’s not a check mark for us.” The relaunch, Greenwald says, “won’t be the same disruptor in the sense of shade numbers, which again wasn’t really even our intention.”

The bigger change is how the shades are organized. The old numbering system is gone; there are no one-to-one replacements, and the new range uses letter codes for cool (C), warm (W), and neutral (N) undertones, with more neutrals overall. The idea is pretty simple: depth can tell you how light or deep your complexion is, but undertone is often where the real foundation-matching trouble begins. “We really took into account the unique undertones that people have,” Wong says.

Array of Fenty Beauty foundation bottles stacked on their sides — Fenty Beauty / Byrdie

Beyond The Shade Range

If 2017 was about making more people feel seen in the complexion category, Fenty thinks the next era of inclusivity is getting a lot more personal. After years of being shaped by the highly filtered Instagram era, Fenty sees consumers moving toward something more individual, and more importantly, more flexible. But the brand is clear: personalization isn’t just about a better shade match. Fenty also wants consumers to help shape what comes next.

Alongside the launch of its foundation, Fenty is also releasing the “Unfilt’rd Inbox” on its website, which will give shoppers a place to submit feedback on shades, including where the brand is still missing the mark. The goal, Wong says, is eventually to close that loop: If enough people flag a gap, Fenty could come back with the shade they helped identify. Virtual shade matching is also rolling out online and on TikTok.

What the Next Decade Asks For

Staying relevant, of course, is easier said than done. Fenty is approaching its 10th anniversary at a moment when the beauty landscape looks drastically different than the one it entered in 2017. As such, the brand is evolving how it talks to consumers, where it operates, and what it asks of its hero products. The foundation reformulation, for example, was tested across markets spanning North America and Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

The timing is also interesting from a business perspective. In October 2025, Reuters reported that LVMH, Fenty’s partner through Kendo Brands, was exploring a sale of its 50% stake with investment bank Evercore. The brand was reportedly valued at an estimated $1-$2 billion, with roughly $450 million in net sales in 2024. In June, it was reported that MarcyPen Capital Partners, the private equity firm co-founded by Jay-Z, was reportedly in talks to acquire LVMH’s stake.

None of that makes Fenty a struggling brand—$450 million in sales is nothing to scoff at—but it does add some context to a decision this big. Fenty is rebuilding its hero product while its ownership is in play, in a beauty market that is still growing but becoming a little more selective. U.S. prestige beauty rose 7% to $17.1 billion in the first half of 2026, while prestige makeup grew just 3%, with unit demand softening.

Mundt sees the decision to discontinue the original foundation as part of the answer to the bigger question of staying relevant. “[To relaunch your hero product] is bold, and when you ask the question, ‘How does Fenty stay relevant?’ That’s how you do it,” she says. “You don’t make one bold move and then live on that for the rest of the brand’s existence.”

But staying relevant isn’t only about what Fenty makes. From the start, the brand has put inclusivity at the forefront, making sure more people can see themselves in the way beauty is marketed and worn. “Men are now being open about the fact that they are wearing complexion products,” Mathews says. “How do we make this language inclusive to all so that it’s not just centered around the female experience? How do we make sure that we are including all of the binaries and all of the communities?”

And then there’s Rihanna. Every celebrity brand eventually faces the same question: How visible does its founder need to be? Berry thinks Fenty has found the right balance. “Consumers are much less impressed by access and fame alone now,” she says. The strongest celebrity brands are ones “where the product can survive without the celebrity constantly carrying it.”

That distinction matters. “What Fenty did well is build brand equity that belongs to Fenty, not just Rihanna,” she says.

Internally, Rihanna is still very much involved. She approves every product and, according to Wong, “She loves to brainstorm on shade names.” She’s also been wearing Fluid Flex for a year. Mundt thinks the brand’s next opportunity may have less to do with beauty trends and more to do with Rihanna’s life itself.

After becoming a mother of three in September 2025, she’s in a very different chapter than she was when Fenty launched. “I love that the brand has been following Rihanna along her life, too. It’s an expression of her, so as she’s grown and evolved, the brand has too. It’s never just been about the products; it’s also about the community [she’s built].”

Rihanna and a fan at a Fenty promotional event closeup of Rihanna showcasing her manicure — Getty Images / Byrdie

The Final Takeaway

In 2017, Fenty’s argument was that beauty should work for more people. It worked so well that what once felt radical has now become table stakes. So the brand is making a different argument this time around: Maybe even your biggest product isn’t sacred. Maybe staying relevant means being willing to look at something that works, listen to how people are actually using it, and decide it can work better. “When we view the work we’ve done from 2017 to now, we’ve never viewed it as completed,” Greenwald says.

Berry sees the opportunity similarly. “Fenty helped prove that inclusion could be profitable,” she says. “Now the opportunity for them is to prove that inclusion can also be highly personalized, highly responsive, and built into every decision the brand makes and not just the launch campaign.”

Her forecast for the next decade: “Fenty’s next decade is less about recreating that first disruptive moment and more about showing that it can keep listening.”

And maybe that’s the more interesting challenge now. Not whether Fenty can have another big —it obviously can—but whether it can keep making beauty feel a little less predictable and a bit more fun.