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This morning I woke up to a beautiful sight. Rihanna clad in a black hoodie with fresh box braids and rectangular sunglasses on, lounging in a hotel bed as she serves herself caviar from a glimmering silver breakfast tray.
The image, which was posted to Instagram, was accompanied by the caption, “How I woke up after #FENTYPARFUM sold out this morning!!!”—hours after its release.
Ahead of the launch of her beauty brand’s first foray into fragrance, Rihanna teased the product with a social media campaign featuring celebrities confirming the long-standing rumour of the pop star being one of the best-smelling celebs. Pulling together footage from over the years, Rihanna shared the likes of Jennifer Lawrence, Lil Nas X, Cardi B and Ryan Seacrest speaking about how incredible she smells, with Lil Nas X saying it’s “like heaven.” Before the launch of her Fenty perfume, Rihanna was reported to wear Kilian’s Love, Don’t Be Shy as her fragrance of choice, a rumour which prompted the fragrance to continually sell out time after time.
The news of her new ultra-successful business venture comes just two days after it was reported the 33-year-old had reached billionaire status through her Fenty Beauty and Savage Fenty Lingerie labels.
Per Forbes, Rihanna is now estimated to be worth $1.7 billion—and that was before the world could buy her smell in a bottle. This sum makes her the wealthiest female musician in the world and the second-wealthiest female entertainer after Oprah. Although she’s known for her music (fans are currently dying for her much-anticipated album R9), the majority of her net worth ($1.4 billion of it) can reportedly be attributed to her beauty company, Fenty Beauty. Her lingerie line, Savage x Fenty, is worth $270 million.
Last week, when paparazzi asked her on the street what it meant to her to be a “self-made billionaire,” Rihanna had a simple answer, “God is good.”
Amid all of the ‘eat the rich’ rhetoric and jokes about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as the most serious stats and figures about how much money billionaires made in the pandemic while others faced illness, death and financial instability, it feels weird to STAN someone reaching billionaire status. When I found out about Rihanna’s, my first thought was ‘get it, girl’, followed by… wait, aren’t we supposed to hate billionaires? I mean, if any other filthy rich person posted themselves eating caviar right now we’d be disgusted.
But when it’s someone who is actually self-made (ahem, Kylie Jenner), who made money by tapping into a gap in a market that consistently only catered to white, thin women, and then created really good products for all skin tones and shapes, perhaps we can make an exception.
The conclusion? Eat the rich, except Rihanna.
