Ariana Grande Sells a Perfume Every 11 Seconds. She Doesn't Own the Company.

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Every 11 seconds, somewhere in the world, [music] someone buys a bottle of Ariana Grande perfume.

[00:00:07]Her fragrance line has crossed $1 billion in sales.

[00:00:11]Department stores call her a beauty empire. Magazines call her a mogul.

[00:00:18]And the public looks at all of it and assumes she owns a fortune in beauty.

[00:00:22][music] She doesn't. She owns almost none of it.

[00:00:28]The billion-dollar perfume business that carries her name and her face is owned by a company most people have never heard of, run by a man named Tony Bahaj.

[00:00:38]Ariana gets a check. He gets the empire.

[00:00:42]And the one beauty brand she actually does own, the one with her name on the building, she had to buy back out of a bankruptcy court >> [music] >> for $15 million.

[00:00:52]So, here's what we're going to do.

[00:00:54]We're going to trace every dollar.

[00:00:56]We'll show you who really owns the perfume, what Ariana actually walks away with from each bottle, and how the brand she fought to own ended up being the smaller [music] prize.

[00:01:08]Stick with us because the numbers flip everything you assumed about celebrity, beauty, [music] money on its head.

[00:01:16]Let's start with the number everyone quotes.

[00:01:19]$1 billion.

[00:01:21]That is the cumulative retail sales [music] figure for Ariana Grande fragrances since the line launched. It is a real number and it is staggering for a celebrity [music] scent.

[00:01:32]Cloud is the engine.

[00:01:35]It launched in 2018 >> [music] >> and it became the single best-selling fragrance at Ulta.

[00:01:40]People compare it to a luxury scent that costs [music] $300 a bottle, except Cloud sells for around $45.

[00:01:49]That price gap is exactly why it moves by the millions.

[00:01:53]Now, when you hear a billion dollars in sales tied to a celebrity's name, your brain does something automatic.

[00:02:00]It assumes the celebrity owns the thing generating [music] the billion.

[00:02:05]With Ariana, that assumption is wrong.

[00:02:08]To understand why, you have to look at who actually built and owns that perfume business.

[00:02:15]That is where it gets interesting.

[00:02:18]The company is called Lux Brands.

[00:02:21]It is a prestige beauty firm founded in 2014 by a man named Tony Bajaj.

[00:02:27]Ariana did not start a perfume company.

[00:02:30]She signed a licensing partnership with one that already existed. Her name, her face, her fan base plugged into Bajaj's manufacturing, >> [music] >> distribution, and retail machine.

[00:02:42]And here is the part that tells you everything.

[00:02:46]When Lux Brands talks about the success, listen to the exact words they use.

[00:02:53]In their own announcements, they describe over 1 billion dollars in retail sales [music] on the Ariana Grande franchise.

[00:03:00]The franchise belongs to them.

[00:03:03]They book the sales.

[00:03:04]>> [music] >> They own the business.

[00:03:07]Ariana is the name on the bottle.

[00:03:10]This is a licensing deal. [music] And licensing deals work in a very specific way.

[00:03:15]The celebrity does not own the company.

[00:03:18]The celebrity licenses their name and collects a royalty.

[00:03:23]Which brings us [music] to the question nobody in those other videos actually answers.

[00:03:28]When you buy a bottle, how much of your money reaches Ariana?

[00:03:32]That's the second part of this story, and the math is brutal.

[00:03:37]Stay with us, >> [music] >> because once you see how a perfume bottle splits up, you'll never look at a celebrity fragrance the same way again.

[00:03:45]Let's break open a bottle. Not the scent, the money.

[00:03:49]Take a celebrity perfume that sells for $100.

[00:03:53]A veteran department store executive once broke down exactly where that $100 goes.

[00:03:59]The actual liquid inside, the fragrance itself, costs about $2.

[00:04:05]The bottle and packaging cost around $4.

[00:04:08]Marketing costs roughly $8.

[00:04:11]The company that manufactures it keeps about $15 in profit.

[00:04:16]The store that sells it keeps about $15.

[00:04:19]Plus another $25 for its overhead and staff.

[00:04:23]And the celebrity?

[00:04:25]The famous name that is the entire reason you picked up the bottle gets about $4.

[00:04:31]$4 out of 100.

[00:04:33]That is the standard celebrity licensing cut.

[00:04:36]>> [music] >> Somewhere in the range of 5 to 10% of the wholesale price.

[00:04:41]The face on the box, the person whose fame sells the entire product, takes one of the smallest slices of all.

[00:04:50]Now scale that up.

[00:04:51]A billion dollars in retail sales sounds like Ariana made a billion dollars.

[00:04:57]She did not.

[00:04:58]>> [music] >> Run it through a licensing royalty and her cumulative cut across a decade lands in the tens of millions.

[00:05:06]Real money, life-changing for almost anyone.

[00:05:10]But it is a rounding error next to the billion the franchise [music] generated.

[00:05:16]And next to what that business is worth to the people who actually own it.

[00:05:21]So if the perfume was never really hers, >> [music] >> you would think the makeup brand would be the happy ending.

[00:05:28]The one she owns outright. [music] Except that story has a courtroom in it.

[00:05:35]Let's get into it.

[00:05:37]Before we get to the courtroom, [music] here's a detail almost nobody knows, and it's a good one.

[00:05:43]Ariana's makeup brand [music] is called REM Beauty.

[00:05:47]It's named after her song REM off the Sweetener album. Sweet enough?

[00:05:52]Except that song wasn't originally hers.

[00:05:55]The melody started as a scrapped Beyoncé demo, a track built by Pharrell Williams that was meant for Beyoncé's album back in [music] 2013.

[00:06:04]It got shelved.

[00:06:05]Years later, Ariana and Pharrell reworked the hook into something [music] new.

[00:06:10]And Ariana confirmed it herself.

[00:06:12]The dreamy hook was too good to waste, so it found a new home on her record.

[00:06:18]So the brand she owns is named after a song that very nearly belonged to Beyoncé.

[00:06:24]Hold that thought, because the ownership theme is about to repeat in [music] a much more expensive way.

[00:06:30]Beauty launched in November 2021.

[00:06:34]And it launched [music] hot.

[00:06:36]$1 million in sales in under 24 hours.

[00:06:39]Times Square billboards, sold out shelves in the first week.

[00:06:44]But here's the catch. Nobody told the fans buying [music] it.

[00:06:48]REM didn't operate on its own. It ran under a licensing deal with a company [music] called Forma Brands. And Forma was the same company behind Morphe, the [music] giant makeup brand built on YouTube influencers like James Charles and Jeffree Star.

[00:07:04]When those influencer partnerships blew up in scandal, Morphe's sales collapsed.

[00:07:09]Forma had borrowed enormous sums during the good years. By late 2022, the company was buried under hundreds of millions in debt. And in January 2023, Forma filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

[00:07:25]Ariana's makeup brand [music] was caught inside a sinking company she didn't control.

[00:07:30]So what did she do? She went to the bankruptcy court and bought her own brand's assets back. The inventory, the orders, even the social media accounts.

[00:07:40]The price? $15 million.

[00:07:43]Ouch.

[00:07:45]A judge named Karen Owens signed off on the deal and a company tied to Ariana walked away owning REM outright at [music] last.

[00:07:55]Think about what that means.

[00:07:57]The brand with her name on it, she had to purchase out of [music] a courtroom to keep it alive.

[00:08:02]Now compare the two numbers side by side because this is the whole story in one frame.

[00:08:09]The perfume she doesn't own, over 1 billion in sales. [music] The makeup she fought to own, rescued for 15 million.

[00:08:18]We're past the halfway point now and the pattern is impossible to unsee.

[00:08:23]Ariana is not the exception. She's the rule, just a purer version of it.

[00:08:30]Look at Rihanna.

[00:08:31]Fenty Beauty is the [music] gold standard of celebrity beauty and Rihanna does not control it. She owns half.

[00:08:39]The other half belongs to the luxury giant LVMH which built the brand through its own incubator.

[00:08:46]In 2024, Fenty did around $450 million in sales and the parent company has been exploring selling its stake at a valuation in the [music] billions.

[00:08:58]Rihanna's the face. She's a partner, not the owner.

[00:09:03]Look at Hailey Bieber.

[00:09:05]Her brand Rhode just sold for a billion dollars to a bigger [music] beauty company.

[00:09:10]Huge win.

[00:09:11]But the deal was structured with hundreds of millions paid up front and the rest hanging on future performance she still has [music] to deliver.

[00:09:19]Look at Kylie Jenner.

[00:09:21]A beauty conglomerate bought a controlling 51% of Kylie Cosmetics years ago.

[00:09:27]Kylie kept the minority. See the pattern?

[00:09:30]The public crowns these women [music] self-made beauty billionaires.

[00:09:35]The reality is most of them are minority owners or licensors of empires that big corporations actually control.

[00:09:44]Ariana just sits at the far end of that spectrum.

[00:09:47]On her biggest beauty business, the perfume, she owns essentially none of the equity. On the one she owns fully, it's a fraction of the size. That's the trick the headlines never explain. And we're almost at the part that ties it all together.

[00:10:03]So, how rich is Ariana Grande really?

[00:10:06]From beauty?

[00:10:08]Far less than the billion-dollar headlines suggest.

[00:10:11]Her actual wealth, estimated in the low couple hundred million range, comes overwhelmingly from music, touring, streaming, her catalog, and her wicked film paydays.

[00:10:23]The beauty side contributes royalty checks from a perfume she licenses, plus the private unrealized value of a makeup brand she now fully owns.

[00:10:33]She is not a billionaire.

[00:10:35]The perfume empire that bears her name made other people far richer than it made her.

[00:10:41]But here is the twist that actually matters for the future.

[00:10:45]The one asset she controls completely is r.e.m.

[00:10:50]In late 2025, [music] riding the wave of the Wicked sequel, r.e.m. did $1 million in 3 hours on a single collection launch.

[00:11:00]If that brand ever sells the way Rhode just did, Ariana finally owns the upside instead [music] of licensing it away.

[00:11:08]That is the real lesson buried in all of this.

[00:11:11]>> [music] >> In the celebrity beauty game, fame sells the product, but ownership keeps the money.

[00:11:18]Ariana spent a decade as the most valuable name in fragrance while owning almost none of [music] it.

[00:11:24]The question now is whether the brand she fought for in a courtroom becomes the one that finally pays her like [music] an owner.

[00:11:32]If this changed how you see celebrity beauty money, you will want [music] to see what we uncovered about Rihanna and the $30 million deal that returned almost nothing.

[00:11:43]Or the Kylie Jenner empire that quietly collapsed. [music] We break down the real numbers behind the names, the deals the headlines skip, and the money nobody else is tracing.

[00:11:55]Subscribe and keep watching.

[00:11:58]The next one will surprise you even more.