In November 2019, Coty paid $600 million for 51% of Kylie Cosmetics, a deal that valued the company at $1.2 billion. The number the Jenner team had put in front of the market implied revenue well above what the books actually showed. When the transaction closed, SEC filings revealed actual trailing twelve-month revenue of $177 million, roughly half the figure the family had publicly claimed, according to a Femfounded case study of the acquisition. Forbes stripped Kylie Jenner of her billionaire status shortly after. That is not a rumor about celebrity beauty. It is a documented restatement, and it happened to the brand that arguably started the modern gold rush.
The discrepancy is real and it matters. It does not mean the category is fiction. Three brands, Fenty Beauty, Rare Beauty, and Kylie Cosmetics, generate revenue that outside auditors, acquiring companies, and public retail reporting can verify. The gap between those three and the 22 celebrity-founded brands that failed in 2025 alone is not a marketing gap. It is an operations gap, and it shows up in the filings.
The three brands whose numbers survive an audit
Fenty Beauty, Rihanna's line launched with LVMH backing in September 2017, hit $100 million in revenue within its first 40 days on shelves, per Femfounded's case study. It generated $72 million in earned media value in its first month, ranking third on Tribe Dynamics' industry leaderboard at the time, according to data cited by StyleCaster. By 2023, Fenty was generating $602.4 million in annual revenue, the highest of any celebrity beauty brand tracked, per a Statista analysis reported by Marie Claire Australia. Reuters later reported net sales cooling to roughly $450 million in 2024, with LVMH reportedly exploring a sale of its 50% stake at a valuation between $1 billion and $2 billion, according to Editions Mego's citation of that reporting.
Rare Beauty, Selena Gomez's brand, took a slower climb and got there anyway. It generated $75.7 million in 2023 revenue, with projections putting 2025 revenue at $400 million, according to an Upbeat Agency analysis cited by Free Yourself. That is roughly a five-fold increase in two years, driven by retail sell-through rather than a press cycle.
Kylie Cosmetics, restatement notwithstanding, is still a functioning business. It generated $351 million in website revenue in 2025, with ECDB projecting 0 to 5% growth in 2026, effectively flat. The underlying demand was never in question: at launch in November 2015, the brand sold 15,000 Lip Kits in under a minute at $29 each, a real signal even if the later revenue figure attached to it was not, per Femfounded.
| Brand | 2023 revenue | Most recent figure | Verified by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fenty Beauty | $602.4 million | ~$450 million net sales (2024) | LVMH ownership, Reuters reporting |
| Rare Beauty | $75.7 million | $400 million projected (2025) | Retail sell-through analysis |
| Kylie Cosmetics | N/A (restated to $177M TTM at 2019 sale) | $351 million web revenue (2025) | Coty SEC filings, ECDB |
What separates the three from the graveyard
The number that matters more than any headline revenue figure is margin. The Femfounded analysis of Coty's disclosures puts Kylie Cosmetics' estimated gross margins at 60% to 70%, meaning each $29 Lip Kit generated roughly $17 to $20 in gross profit, with EBITDA margins exceeding 25%, per the same filing analysis. A business throwing off 25%-plus EBITDA on a lip gloss is a real business, whatever the top-line dispute that preceded it.
Compare that to Item Beauty, Addison Rae's brand, launched in 2020 with a large TikTok following that generated coverage but not repeat purchase. It shut down in 2023, the clean case cited by Social Life Magazine for why a social following is not the same asset as a customer file.
Or consider Forma Brands, parent company of Morphe, which filed for Chapter 11 in early 2023, closed nearly 20 U.S. Morphe stores, and ended its licensing arrangement with Ariana Grande, according to The Robin Report. Morphe was never short on celebrity wattage. It was short on the unit economics that keep a retail footprint solvent once the trend cycle turns.
None of this is a downturn. BeautyMatter's tracker counted 22 celebrity and independent beauty brand failures in 2025, versus 25 in 2024 and 28 in 2023. The attrition rate has stayed elevated for three straight years. It is the baseline condition of the category, not a correction to it.
The opposing case, stated plainly
The strongest version of the skeptical argument is not that celebrity brands fail sometimes. It is that the ones that appear to succeed may be reporting the same kind of numbers that got Kylie Jenner's billionaire status revoked: figures generated by the celebrity's own team, amplified by press coverage that rarely asks for the underlying filing, and rarely corrected until an acquirer's due diligence forces the truth out. If Kylie Cosmetics could overstate revenue by roughly double to a sophisticated acquirer with lawyers and accountants on both sides, per the filings Femfounded reviewed, what confidence should anyone have in a press-released number for a brand that has never faced that kind of scrutiny?
That is a fair question, and the answer is not that every celebrity brand number should be trusted. It is that the numbers worth trusting are the ones with a counterparty who had something to lose by being wrong. Coty's $600 million check bought a real look at Kylie Cosmetics' books, and the correction happened because of that transaction, not despite it. Fenty's figures pass through a similar filter: LVMH has owned half the company since 2017, and its reported exploration of a sale, cited by Editions Mego, will require the same disclosure process that caught Kylie Cosmetics out. Rare Beauty's climb from $75.7 million to a projected $400 million, per Free Yourself, comes from retail sell-through data at Sephora, not the celebrity's own press shop.
The working rule: trust the numbers that have been through an acquisition, a public retailer's reporting, or a bankruptcy filing. Treat everything else, especially anything timed to a launch date, as marketing until proven otherwise.
Who benefits from each version of the story
The people who benefit from believing every celebrity beauty brand is a hit are the celebrity's management company, which takes a cut of licensing or equity regardless of whether the brand turns a profit, and the retailer that gets a launch-week traffic spike even if the line is discontinued within two years, as happened across nearly 20 Morphe stores tied to Forma Brands' bankruptcy. The people who benefit from the skeptical read are acquirers like Coty and LVMH, who use exactly this kind of discrepancy to negotiate valuation down, and consumers deciding where to spend $29 on the strength of a name rather than a formula.
The claim that Fenty, Rare Beauty, and Kylie Cosmetics are the exceptions rather than the rule fails under one condition: a fourth brand emerges with the same combination of retail distribution, a genuine category need such as Fenty's 40-shade foundation range or Rare Beauty's mental health positioning with its target buyer, and an operating partner with audit rights over the books. That combination is rare by design. Most celebrity beauty launches arrive with none of the three, which is why the failure rate has sat between 22 and 28 brands a year since 2023, per BeautyMatter.
The tradeoff facing anyone evaluating a new celebrity beauty launch, an investor, a retail buyer, a consumer with $29 to spend, is the same one Coty faced in 2019: the press release comes first, the audit comes later, and by the time the second number arrives the celebrity has usually already moved on to the next line.