Traveling can take a toll on your skin. But so can being the world's biggest pop star, fashion designer, and beauty mogul. Rihanna has learned—through trial, error, and skin mishaps—that healthy, glowing skin comes not from excess but from a simple, effective routine. That's why BAZAAR's September cover star launched Fenty Skin this month—a collection of three key products designed for all skin.
"I’ve always seen the Fenty brand as more than just makeup, and I knew I wanted to make skin care from the very beginning,” Rihanna tells BAZAAR. “It was just about getting it right. You have to live with the formulas for awhile and test them in different ways. It’s very different from makeup in that sense. It takes a long time.”
Shop Rihanna's Routine
Fenty Skin REMOVE-IT-ALL CLEANSER
Fenty Skin FAT WATER PORE-REFINING TONER SERUM
Fenty Skin INVISIBLE MOISTURIZER
All that time resulted in three products: a cleanser, toner-serum hybrid, and a moisturizer with SPF 30. Vegan, cruelty-free, and oil-free, the Fenty Skin suite is designed to give us all that Rihanna glow.
The mogul walks us through her nighttime skin care routine for the latest episode of Go To Bed With Me. She starts by removing her makeup and cleansing with Fenty Skin's Total Cleans'r. Using a quarter-sized dollop of the thick gel-cream formula, she adds water to her hands to create lather before working it over her skin. That one step breaks up her makeup and gets her skin clean. "My skin feels really supple and really soft because as I was cleansing our Total Cleans'r adds nutrients right back into your skin," she says.
For Rihanna, hydration and a healthy diet are key. "Hydration, so whether it's drinking a lot of water, or I travel a lot so my skin gets dry on the plane and I need to stay hydrated, so I use our Fenty Beauty hydrating mist. It's a makeup refreshing mist but it also doubles as a hydrating mist and it leaves a lot of hydration on my skin and in my skin throughout the flight," she says. "A healthy diet, people from the best, most exotic islands with access to the best ingredients and stuff like that and the best environment, climate, and humidity—their skin is so beautiful. I try to implement a lot of those ingredients into my skincare line."
One of those ingredients is the Barbados cherry, which is found throughout the Fenty Skin line. "That ingredient is packed with a lot of vitamin c, more than a whole orange. So imagine what that does for your beautiful skin," she adds.
Her second step is the Fat Water toner-serum hybrid. "So I called it Fat Water because unlike most toners this one just sits in your hand. By now most of my toners would have already ran through my fingers, and it forces you to use like cotton pads and stuff like that," she says. She pats it into her skin to brighten, tone, reduce oil, and reduce the appearance of pores. "The smaller the pores the younger you look. At 32 I like to keep tight you know what I'm saying?" she adds.
Rihanna made Fenty Skin with the Earth in mind, which is why she avoided single-use makeup wipes. "I think it's kind of a wrap for makeup wipes," she adds. The Fenty Skin twist-open and twist-close caps make quick work of any skin care routine, and the streamlined packaging means the products use less plastic overall. The Fenty Skin line isn’t exactly green, but it’s definitely made with sustainability in mind. The bottles are made using PCR and can be recycled.
The final step in her nightly routine is moisturizer, which is the product Rihanna is most proud of in the line. Having grown up around coral reefs in Barbados, she made sure the SPF 30 in the formula was reef-safe and entirely invisible on all skin tones. "For me, the product I would splurge the most on is moisturizer," she says. The mogul uses a dime-sized dollop and works it into her hands before massaging it over her skin. She notes that her routine at night and in the morning is the same, and the moisturizer can be used both under makeup or alone. People of all skin tones need to wear SPF daily, and with Hydra Vizor that step becomes not a chore but a daily act of luxury.
Don't forget to subscribe to BAZAAR's YouTube channel so you never miss an episode of On the Rise, Playback, Go to Bed with Me, This Look Is Money, Little Black Book, Heel Hunters, or Food Diaries.
Jenna Rosenstein is the Beauty Director at Harper's BAZAAR across both print and digital. While attending NYU, she held internships at Women’s Wear Daily, Bloomingdale’s, Harper’s BAZAAR, and Allure, the latter of which she parlayed into her first job as the Beauty Assistant. She left Allure three years later as the Senior Beauty Editor. She spent a few months at Refinery29 overseeing branded content in the same title, before finally landing back at BAZAAR to manage all beauty content. When she's not testing every lipstick known to mankind, getting zapped by new lasers, or interviewing experts and celebrities, you can find Rosenstein at home in New Jersey with her son, husband, and black cat named Maddie.
