Rare Beauty Takes Its Accessible Bottle Design to a NY Sidewalk

Rare Beauty parked a rollerball taller than the people trying it on a Chelsea sidewalk this week.

Selena Gomez's brand used the oversized applicator on a wall to introduce "Rare Beginnings," its second Eau de Parfum.

Passersby rolled a wrist against it and walked off wearing the new scent. The best part? There was no counter or store required.

The stunt repeats a design decision that makes up the bottle.

Rare Beauty developed its fragrance pump with certified hand therapists and packaging engineers.

The oversized design lets people with limited dexterity press it with any part of the hand.

In the brand's consumer study of 56 people with mild to severe upper extremity impairments, 96% said the oversized pump was easier to press.

The sidewalk rollerball showcases the same thinking at street scale.

Set up like street furniture, the giant rollerball made a five-second sample become a small detour.

Rare Beginnings opens with pear nectar, moves into gardenia and jasmine, and settles into warm vanilla bean.

The brand told followers to "slow your roll for this one" before pointing them to the corner where the rollerball was set.

The Internet Speaks

Reaction split fast once photos of the activation started making rounds. Marketers largely liked it.

One commenter praised the physical turnout that the stunt demanded, calling it "a moment people actually have to show up for."

Another credited the scent itself for the chatter, saying it "makes the launch feel much more tangible."

But not everyone agreed.

Some commenters called rolling a shared applicator against bare skin unhygienic.

Meanwhile, others questioned whether rolling the scent onto skin changes how it actually wears compared with spraying it straight from the bottle.

The complaints sit awkwardly next to the pitch.

Rare Beauty made accessible design the center of its fragrance marketing, and a shared applicator narrows who feels comfortable using it.

Two Days on 7th Avenue

The giant rollerball sat at 341 7th Ave. and West 29th Street on August 8 and 9.

Passersby had a two-day window to try the scent.

Rare Beauty tried a version of this street-level sampling once before.

Ahead of Rare Eau de Parfum, the brand's first fragrance, the brand worked with Shopify's Shop app in 2025 to install scratch-and-sniff billboards in Soho and Chelsea.

This gave fans a way to smell the scent in person and then order an early sample straight from the app.

Rare Beginnings gets a bigger rollout this time, with Gomez previewing the fragrance at a London event on July 27.

The perfume reached Sephora on August 7, with early access through the Sephora app on August 6.

The rollerball adds a street-level layer of experiential marketing to a launch that otherwise runs across film, key visuals, and paid digital.

Rare Beginnings is the second global campaign Rare Beauty has run with creative company Fred & Farid, after the 2024 brand campaign "Every Side of You."

Hans Neumann directed the 45-second hero film, which draws on Greek mythology and uses a nymph as a metaphor for self-revelation.

Fragrance Still Sells Better in Person

Fragrance is one of the categories still fighting the online sell, and Rare Beauty already has its own read on the problem.

Ashley Murphy, the brand's VP of consumer marketing, said the 2025 billboards drove trial before the fragrance hit shelves.

This is the reason the scratch-and-sniff format existed at all.

A giant rollerball on a sidewalk works as a sales tool as much as a stunt.

Rare Beauty's rollerball ad offers three takeaways for marketers planning physical sampling:

• Make the sample impossible to ignore: A rollerball scaled past human height stretches a five-second dab into something people stop, watch, and photograph before they even try it.
• Build the stunt around a detail already in the product: Rare Beginnings' extra-wide pump already signaled easy application, so the giant rollerball simply carries that detail to sidewalk scale.
• Let mixed reactions run their course: The hygiene complaints and tangibility praise both kept the activation in people's feeds longer than a clean, universally liked post would have.

For a category that keeps losing sales to bottles nobody ever opens, an oversized rollerball on a wall hands people back the one sense a screen can't deliver.

Our Take: Was Two Days Enough?

Rare Beauty spent more than two years engineering a bottle for people who struggle with standard perfume pumps.

Two days on one corner was enough to fill feeds, but we think it was short for the audience the bottle engineering was meant to serve.

Anyone who plans outings around accessibility needs more warning than a 48-hour window on 7th Avenue.

The hygiene complaints name a second group left out, since anyone immunocompromised has a real reason to skip a shared applicator on a sidewalk.

It's kind of ironic for a brand whose founder has been open about living with lupus.

We think a better version of this stunt is sitting inside Rare Beauty's own product design.

Sephora already carries the brand, and a rollerball station inside a handful of stores would give the accessibility story a longer run than a weekend.

Looking to create a consumer beauty brand with long-term recognition?

Explore these top beauty marketing agencies to develop identities that translate across products, retail, and culture.