Design Spotlight - Rare Beauty: What Inclusive Design Reveals About Who Beauty Has Excluded

The first thing you notice is not the colour of Rare Beauty’s blush, nor the softness of its finish. It is the object’s behaviour in your hand.

The cap offers less resistance than expected. The bottle does not immediately slide away. The shape gives the fingers somewhere to settle. A product that, in another context, might be described as elegant or minimal instead seems to be asking a more practical question: How many different ways might a person need to hold this?

That question has been strangely absent from beauty.

For much of its modern history, the industry has imagined a consumer with a steady grip, precise fingers, good eyesight, unchanging skin, and enough strength to twist, pull, press and coordinate a sequence of small mechanical actions. The ideal beauty user was not only young and conventionally attractive; she was physically capable in a very particular way.

Everyone else was expected to improvise.

They learned to brace a bottle against a table. They used their teeth to remove a lid. They abandoned products that were too difficult to open. They asked someone else to fasten, twist or spray them. Often, they did this without identifying the problem as exclusion. They simply assumed the problem was their own body.

This is what makes inclusive design so revealing. It does not merely offer a solution to inconvenience. It exposes the assumptions hidden inside the inconvenience.

The hand the industry forgot

A beauty product is a small piece of industrial design masquerading as an object of desire. Its packaging may be coloured, polished, weighted and sculpted to suggest luxury, but beneath the appearance are a series of demands: grip here, apply pressure there, rotate clockwise, remove the applicator without spilling, hold the bottle steadily while directing the product towards a face.

These demands are so familiar that most of us no longer see them.

For someone with arthritis, tremors, reduced muscle strength, limited mobility or a neurological condition, however, they can turn a five-second task into a negotiation. A lid that feels satisfyingly tight to one person may be painful or impossible for another. A narrow wand that suggests precision may offer very little control. A glossy finish that catches the light beautifully may be difficult to hold.

Research into disability-inclusive beauty design has identified barriers not only in packaging, but also in representation, product availability and the attitudes surrounding disability. One review of the field argues that people with disabilities are frequently treated as an afterthought in both design and marketing, despite the fact that more accessible products may also benefit older consumers and anyone who values ease and functionality.

The point is not that every product must be designed for every possible circumstance. That would be impossible. The point is that the industry has often treated one narrow set of physical abilities as universal—and everyone outside that set as exceptional.

Rare Beauty’s Made Accessible Initiative began with a recognition of that failure. According to the brand, it partnered with the Casa Colina Research Institute to investigate which features make beauty products easier to open, hold and apply for people with dexterity difficulties. The study examined grip, manoeuvrability, packaging design and applicators, with participants documenting their experiences and suggesting improvements.

The language is technical: resistance, surface texture, leverage, actuator size. But the consequences are intimate.

A person who cannot open a product cannot participate in the ritual the product was created to provide. The barrier is not only mechanical. It can become social and psychological. Beauty is one of the ways people prepare to enter the world—to work, meet friends, attend a celebration, mark an ordinary morning as their own. If a person is repeatedly told, through the objects available to them, that this ritual was not designed for their body, the message accumulates.

The problem is not simply that the bottle is difficult.

The problem is that the person has been made to feel difficult.

When elegance becomes a barrier

Beauty packaging has traditionally prized visual drama. Perfume bottles become sculptures. Lipsticks are polished into miniature monuments. Compact powders are made to feel like jewellery. A product can be described as luxurious because it is heavy, intricate, highly sealed or satisfyingly resistant.

But resistance is not neutral.

An industry trained to interpret weight as value and complexity as sophistication can overlook the difference between a product that feels substantial and one that creates unnecessary physical effort. The design may look exquisite in a still-life photograph while functioning as a locked door.

This tension is especially visible in fragrance. The conventional perfume atomiser generally relies on a small actuator designed to be pressed by one finger. For people with limited hand strength or dexterity, that familiar mechanism can be remarkably difficult to operate.

In reporting on Rare Beauty’s first fragrance, Fast Company described a bottle developed over more than two years with occupational therapists and hand specialists. Its rounded form is intended to provide a more secure grip, while a wider pump allows pressure to be applied using multiple fingers, the palm or—if necessary—another part of the body. Its cap uses a twist-lock mechanism rather than a conventional pull-off lid.

The article includes an account from a disabled beauty enthusiast who had largely relied on roll-on fragrance because standard atomisers were too difficult to activate. The writer described being able, for the first time, to produce a fine spray independently. The emotional force of the anecdote lies in its ordinariness: no dramatic medical breakthrough, only the simple pleasure of applying perfume without assistance.

That is the scale at which exclusion often operates. Not in grand prohibitions, but in small dependencies.

A person may be entirely independent in most areas of life and still need help opening a mascara. They may be able to dress, work, travel and care for others, yet be unable to use a product marketed as an everyday expression of autonomy. The contradiction is easy to miss because the beauty industry has rarely considered packaging part of the user’s dignity.

Designing from the margin

Inclusive design is sometimes presented as a generous act: a brand extending its attention to people who have previously been overlooked. But there is another way to understand it. Designing for the margins is often a method of discovering how poorly the centre was designed in the first place.

A bottle that can be held securely by someone with limited grip may also be easier to use when a consumer is rushing, travelling, wearing long nails or applying makeup with one hand. A pump that can be pressed with several fingers may be useful to someone with a disability, but also to a parent holding a child, a person recovering from an injury or anyone whose hands are wet.

The broader design principle is sometimes called universal design: creating products that can be used by as many people as possible without requiring special adaptation. It does not mean that every design meets every need. It means variability is considered at the beginning rather than treated as a problem to be solved later.

Rare Beauty’s own account of its accessibility work identifies three practical priorities: packaging that is easy to use, finishes that provide a secure grip, and applicators that are comfortable to hold and manoeuvre with precision.

These may sound modest. That is partly because good design often becomes invisible when it succeeds. We notice the struggle, not the absence of struggle.

The more revealing question is why these features were not standard before.

From feedback to philosophy

Rare Beauty says its accessibility work emerged organically. Selena Gomez has spoken about being drawn to packaging that is easy to open, close, hold and apply, and the brand says customer feedback encouraged it to investigate the issue more formally.

There is an important distinction here between a founder’s personal experience and a properly inclusive design process. Personal experience can direct attention, but it cannot stand in for the experiences of an entire community. A person with lupus, for example, may encounter fatigue, pain or weakness in ways that differ from someone with arthritis, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease or a visual impairment.

The value of Rare Beauty’s partnership with Casa Colina is therefore not simply that it confirms what the founder already sensed. It is that it introduces clinical expertise and participant feedback into a process that might otherwise remain anecdotal.

The brand’s more recent foundation development illustrates how demanding that process can be. In an interview with Forbes, Rare Beauty’s Joyce Kim described collaboration with certified hand therapists, packaging designers and engineers. The team tested different sizes, shapes, opening mechanisms, dispensing methods, materials and surface textures, returning repeatedly to the question of whether each decision made the product more usable and intuitive.

This is the investigative detail that tends to disappear from a product launch. Consumers see the final bottle; they do not see the prototypes that failed, the mechanisms that were too stiff, the textures that interfered with the formula or the compromises imposed by manufacturing.

Kim also acknowledged that accessibility-focused packaging is complex and resource-intensive. Custom components require investment, extended testing and careful assessment of how packaging interacts with a formula over time.

That admission matters because it prevents accessibility from becoming a sentimental story about good intentions. If inclusive design is to become a standard, the industry must treat it as part of research and development—not as a decorative value added at the end of a campaign.

The danger of the accessible aesthetic

There is, nevertheless, a question Rare Beauty cannot answer through packaging alone: when does inclusion become a design philosophy, and when does it become a marketing asset?

The beauty industry is fluent in the language of belonging. “For everyone” is easy to print on a website. “Inclusive” can become a colour palette, a casting decision or a campaign headline. But genuine inclusion is harder to perform because it requires changes to the object, the process and the distribution of power.

Who was involved in testing the product? Were disabled consumers paid for their expertise? Can they find accessible instructions and tutorials? Is the website compatible with assistive technologies? Are products available at prices that do not turn accessibility into a luxury? Can a customer obtain help in-store without being patronised?

A product may be easy to grip and still be inaccessible in other ways. A campaign may feature a disabled model while failing to design products for disabled customers. A brand may celebrate difference visually while continuing to define beauty through a narrow range of faces, bodies and skin conditions.

This is why functional design is such a useful test. Representation can be symbolic. A lid either opens or it does not.

The body is an unusually honest critic.

What beauty has called “normal”

The deeper revelation of inclusive design is that beauty has never been merely about appearance. It has always been about who is imagined as a participant.

The traditional consumer was expected to have the right face, the right skin tone, the right age, the right gender presentation—and, quietly, the right hands. The industry’s exclusions were physical as well as cultural.

This has consequences for how disability is understood. When disabled people appear in beauty campaigns, they are often framed as inspirational exceptions: people overcoming limitation, proving their confidence or demonstrating that they, too, can be beautiful. But the existence of a difficult bottle complicates that narrative. It suggests that the limitation may not belong to the person at all. It may belong to the object.

Inclusive design relocates the question from Can this person use beauty? to Why did we build beauty this way?

That is a significant shift.

It moves the conversation away from individual resilience and towards collective responsibility. It asks companies to examine the systems, habits and aesthetic preferences that have been mistaken for necessity.

A different kind of luxury

Luxury has traditionally meant exclusivity: the rare material, the difficult technique, the object available only to those who can afford or access it. Inclusive design proposes another definition. Luxury might be the feeling that an object has been carefully considered—not merely made beautiful, but made attentive.

A wide pump. A matte surface. A cap that does not require force. A bottle shaped for leverage rather than ornament alone.

These are not compromises between beauty and function. They are evidence that the two were never opposites.

The most interesting design is often not the design that announces itself. It is the design that allows a person to proceed without interruption: to open the bottle, control the product, complete the ritual and recognise themselves in the experience.

That is why a small mechanical adjustment can carry such symbolic weight. It says that independence was considered. It says that difference was anticipated. It says the customer was not an inconvenience waiting outside the category.

Rare Beauty’s work is not proof that the beauty industry has solved accessibility. No single brand could do that. But its research, partnerships and willingness to discuss the costs and complications of accessible design make the subject harder to dismiss as a trend. The company says it intends to share its findings with the wider industry, a move that could matter if accessibility is treated as collective knowledge rather than proprietary advantage.

The challenge now is whether other brands will follow—not only by copying a rounded bottle or a larger pump, but by adopting the more difficult principle beneath them.

Design begins with attention.

For decades, beauty paid attention to the face in the mirror but not always to the hand holding the product. Inclusive design asks the industry to look again: at the grip, the wrist, the tremor, the fatigue, the workaround, the person who has been quietly excluded by an object presented as universal.

The bottle remains small. The gesture remains ordinary.

But when it opens without pain, when it sprays without assistance, when it can be held securely by a hand the industry did not previously imagine, the object makes a larger argument.

Beauty should not require the body to prove that it belongs.