What Rihanna Does with Six Minutes

YouTube beauty tutorials were a particular kind of purgatory for a long time. Influencers with ring lights and drugstore palettes filming themselves in their bedrooms, applying blue eyeshadow over neon lipstick and insisting it was good—and people believed them, bought the collaboration collections, added them to feeds already clogged with people telling you how to look. The whole ecosystem ran on confidence inversely proportional to actual skill.

Then Rihanna started doing it, and every single one of those videos became irrelevant overnight. Not Beyoncé—Rihanna. Different lane, different energy.

Her "Tuesday Tutorials" on YouTube are disarmingly simple: Rihanna, close-framed, applying Fenty Beauty products to her face for a few minutes while occasionally smiling at the camera. No dramatic transformations, no competitive tutorial energy, no look designed to make you feel under-equipped. Just her—"Wild Thoughts," "Diamond Bomb," "Chillowt"—moving product across her skin like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which, on her face, it is.

She’s clearly selling something, and she’s not hiding that she’s selling something, which makes the whole thing more appealing rather than less. The transparency functions as a kind of respect. You know what you’re watching. You watch it anyway. I watched three of them back to back and found the experience genuinely enjoyable in a way I’d struggle to explain to anyone who doesn’t already understand it.

I probably won’t buy the products. But I’d watch another one right now if it were up.