Selena Gomez has been unusually public about her own mental health, and she built that candor into the business model of Rare Beauty, the cosmetics company she launched in 2020. From the start, the brand committed a share of sales to the Rare Impact Fund, a philanthropic effort aimed at expanding access to mental-health services for young people in underserved communities, with a stated ambition to mobilize 100 million dollars over roughly a decade.
The mechanism is what sets it apart from a one-off celebrity donation. Rather than a single check, the fund is fed on an ongoing basis by a percentage of Rare Beauty's sales together with money raised from partners, so that the act of buying a product routes a sliver of the purchase toward mental-health programs. It is a structure designed to keep giving after the launch headlines fade.
In October 2024, Gomez hosted the fund's second annual benefit in Los Angeles. As Good Morning America reported, the event took place on October 24 and leaned on the kind of star power that draws coverage and donors alike, with performances and a program built around raising both money and awareness for youth mental health globally. Pre-event announcements had billed it as a night of radiance and reflection, with musical guests and a live-auction format.
An annual benefit serves a purpose beyond the sum raised in one evening. It creates a recurring moment to report progress, recruit new partners and keep a long, unglamorous goal in the public eye, the mental-health equivalent of a company's yearly shareholder meeting, except the dividend is counted in young people reached.
The cause itself is not niche. Youth mental-health advocates point to sharp rises in reported distress among adolescents over the past decade, and the Rare Impact Fund's framing, access to services in underserved communities, targets the gap between the many who need help and the few who can reach it. Gomez's own story, told repeatedly and without varnish, is part of why the message lands.
A note of care is warranted on numbers. The 100 million dollar figure is a goal the fund set at the outset, not a sum already banked, and cumulative totals quoted in secondary coverage have varied. Those are precisely the details that should be read from the fund's own reporting rather than from any single news write-up.
For the authoritative account of how much has been raised, which nonprofit partners the money supports, and how to donate, the Rare Impact Fund is the place to go. Treat its published figures as the reference point and confirm any specific total there before repeating it.
Source date: October 24, 2024. Contextual photograph; it does not depict the people or the specific event described in this article. Photo: UC Davis College of Engineering, CC BY 2.0 ↗.
Sources & further reading
This article is editorial coverage, not an endorsement. For donations or programme participation, go directly to the organization’s official website.
