Rihanna’s three beauty brands, Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin and Fenty Hair, each won a category at Allure’s 2026 Best of Beauty Awards, marking one of the few times a single beauty founder’s makeup, skincare and haircare lines have all won independently in the same award cycle.
The Three Winning Products
Fenty Beauty’s Shake ‘N Play Buildable Liquid Blush won Best Liquid Blush, Fenty Skin’s Dew N Plump Intense Hydration Slushie Mask won Best Hydrating Mask, and Fenty Hair’s The Imposter
Invisi-Boost Volumizing Dry Shampoo won Best Dry Shampoo Powder, according to Complex, citing Allure’s announcement. Allure Beauty Director Sarah Kinonen said of the blush that it “survives her commute even in summer humidity,” and praised the dry shampoo for the “freshly clean, lifted look” it gives third- or fourth-day hair.
The wins were part of Allure’s 30th anniversary Best of Beauty Awards, which named 319 total products across its full 2026 list, meaning Fenty’s three winners represent a small but notable slice of an awards program that spans the entire beauty industry.
A Decade of Building Three Separate Categories
Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with 40 foundation shades, a range that reset industry standards for shade inclusivity and became the brand’s defining early achievement. Fenty Skin followed in 2020, and Fenty Hair launched in 2024, meaning this year’s sweep spans products introduced across a nine-year span rather than a single product line’s ongoing momentum.
Rihanna won an Allure Breakthrough Award in 2018, the year after Fenty Beauty’s launch; this year’s wins across three separate verticals arrive eight years later, with each brand now competing and winning on its own footing rather than on the strength of the original launch’s buzz.
Why a Cross-Category Sweep Is Unusual
Beauty award programs like Allure’s typically see a single line dominate its own category, makeup brands winning makeup awards, skincare brands winning skincare awards, rather than one founder’s ventures winning across three entirely different product categories in the same cycle. That pattern usually reflects how specialized the underlying industries are: a company skilled at formulating pigmented, buildable makeup does not automatically transfer that expertise to hydrating skincare formulas or dry shampoo technology. Fenty’s sweep across all three suggests the company, operated under LVMH’s Kendo Brands, has built genuine product development capability in each category independently rather than relying on brand recognition alone to carry weaker products across categories.
The Shade Range That Reset an Industry Standard
Fenty Beauty’s 2017 launch is still cited across the beauty industry as the moment foundation shade ranges changed permanently. Before Fenty Beauty introduced 40 shades at launch, the industry standard among major cosmetics brands typically topped out closer to a dozen or two, leaving many people with darker or less common skin tones unable to find a close match at mainstream retailers.
Competitors expanded their own shade ranges in the years immediately following Fenty’s debut, a shift widely credited to the commercial and cultural pressure the brand’s launch created rather than to independent decisions across the industry happening at the same time by coincidence. That reputation is part of why this year’s Best of Beauty wins register as more than a routine award cycle: they extend a brand identity built specifically around inclusivity and product performance into two newer categories, skincare and haircare, where Fenty had to establish credibility from scratch rather than inherit it from the original makeup line’s reputation.
Part of a Broader Beauty and Fashion Portfolio
Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin and Fenty Hair sit alongside Savage X Fenty, Rihanna’s lingerie and apparel line launched in 2018, as the core of the business ventures she has built under the broader Fenty name since Fenty Beauty’s 2017 debut. That combination of a beauty conglomerate operated through LVMH’s Kendo Brands and an independently run apparel line has made Rihanna one of the most commercially established celebrity founders in either industry, a position this week’s three-category sweep reinforces specifically within beauty rather than fashion.
Fenty Beauty and Fenty Skin operate through Kendo Brands, the incubator LVMH uses to develop and distribute beauty lines, which gives the two lines access to the luxury conglomerate’s manufacturing, distribution and retail relationships in a way that an independent startup beauty brand typically would not have from launch. Fenty Hair’s 2024 debut followed that same operating structure, meaning all three of this week’s winning products moved through the same corporate development pipeline even though they compete in three unrelated product categories.
What Happens Next
Allure’s full 2026 Best of Beauty package continues rolling out across the publication’s platforms, and Fenty and Kendo Brands are expected to promote the wins across owned marketing and social channels in the coming weeks. No new product announcements are attached to the awards themselves, since the recognition covers products already on the market rather than upcoming launches.
With all three Fenty lines now holding independent category wins, the next test for the brand will be whether Fenty Hair, the newest of the three ventures, can sustain the same award-cycle presence in future years that Fenty Beauty has built over its first decade.
