Selena Gomez Took Four Years Off From Social Media. She Talks About That — and More — at Rare Beauty’s Mental Health Summit  

Selena Gomez‘s Rare Beauty is urging people to call their loved ones as part of a 2024 mental health awareness campaign called Make a Good Call.

The campaign, introduced by the brand’s chief marketing officer Katie Welch at the company’s third annual Mental Health Summit in New York Wednesday, also includes an option to call the Rare Beauty hotline and get a positive affirmation from someone at the company — including Gomez.

“Rare Beauty is more than a brand. This is what Selena wanted to do. We’re about starting positive conversations around self acceptance and mental health,” Welch said. “We are changing and challenging these standards of perfection within beauty and beyond by doing things like we’re doing today.”

Guests at the event included content creators, media, several of the brand’s Rare Impact Fund mental health grantees and other friends of Rare Beauty. Throughout the day, guests enjoyed a slew of experiences and freebies, including a phone charm-making booth, a floral bouquet station, a mindfulness session and a storytelling workshop led by the Jed Foundation. Panelists throughout the day included Gomez, Sephora content creator Carla Cassandra, author Priya Parker and the U.S. surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy. In the gift bag, which was stocked with Rare Beauty goodies, was the company’s 2023 social impact report, which listed many of the brand’s milestones, most notably that its Rare Impact Fund has raised more than $13 million since its inception.

To kick off the day, Gomez took the stage with Murthy to discuss the power of community in a conversation moderated by Rare Beauty executive vice president of social impact and inclusion Elyse Cohen. The discussion revolved heavily around the loneliness epidemic, a concept Murthy first presented in 2023. 

“[Loneliness is] a deep source of pain, and it’s partly so painful because we need each other. We need our relationships with one another to really survive and to thrive to be healthy both mentally and physically,” Murthy said. “When we don’t have that, it’s almost like we’re missing food or water, something else that’s vital for our survival.”

Social media has an impact on mental health, too, the speakers agreed.

“I have a very complex relationship with social media. I remember when it came out, it was the weirdest thing.…A lot of feelings that I didn’t feel growing up, just started happening. It would make me feel like I wasn’t good enough,” Gomez said. “I took four years off and that was the best thing because I was actually aware of what was happening.”

Murthy said it’s important to create tech-free zones and develop safety features to protect users from social media’s negative impacts.

But it’s not all bad — Gomez and many other speakers throughout the day reflected on the positive power of social media for building community, something Rare Beauty is working to establish, as are platforms like Lemons by Tay, a blog from content creator Tay Dome Lautner who posts about her journey with mental health. Lautner said the response has been wildly positive as her followers are able to connect with her experience.

“We’ve gotten to a point where it’s become a trendy thing to talk about mental health but actually physically talking about it is so needed,” she said.

“It’s just finding ways to reach out to the people next to you and even if it’s not the same battles, we’re all going through things,” said Sephora content creator Cassandra. “You find people to help fix the parts that they didn’t break.”