On Friday, Rihanna attended the launch of Fenty Beauty Avenue at Sephora Champs Elysées in Paris wearing a strapless gold gown. The shimmering material ruched around her torso into a waving sculptural form before connecting to a mermaid skirt that extended around her feet in a small train.
The star wore her hair down, with a natural makeup palette and a glossy brown lip. Around her neck, the ANTI singer wore a diamond choker necklace. The event was specifically celebrating the release of Fenty’s Gloss Bomb Lip Oil Luminizer, which the star modeled how to use on her own lips. In a speech to guests, Rihanna shared how excited she was to be at the Parisian beauty store, saying, “It does not get more iconic than that for a beauty brand, for any brand, really. Champs Elysées is one of those streets you just, like, dream.”
Though Rihanna has experienced amazing success with her beauty and fashion brands, she told Harper’s Bazaar in a March cover story that she is still working on her ninth album.
She is “really optimistic” about the music, she said. “This feels right. It feels like it digs right into where I need to be, and I want this. This body needs to come out, and I’m ready to go there. This is becoming my new freedom, because when I’m in the studio, I know that my time away from my kids [RZA and Riot] is to blossom something that hasn’t been watered in eight years. I’ve been in the studio the whole eight years. But it didn’t hit me. I was searching for it. I went through phases of what I wanted to do. ‘This kind of album, not that album.’ I know it’s not going to be anything that anybody expects. And it’s not going to be commercial or radio digestible. It’s going to be where my artistry deserves to be right now. I feel like I’ve finally cracked it, girl!”
And it won’t be a reggae album.
“There’s no genre now,” she revealed. “That’s why I waited. Every time, I was just like, ‘No, it’s not me. It’s not right. It’s not matching my growth. It’s not matching my evolution. I can’t do this. I can’t stand by this. I can’t perform this for a year on tour.’ After a while, I looked at it, and I was like, this much time away from music needs to count for the next thing everyone hears. It has to count. It has to matter. I have to show them the worth in the wait. I cannot put up anything mediocre. After waiting eight years, you might as well just wait some more.”
