When Selena Gomez isn’t inspiring us to book nail appointments with her red carpet manicures or jamming to Grammy Record of the Year-winner Kendrick Lamar (“I’m listening to a lot of [him],” she tells us IRL), you can find her paving new paths for her industry-disrupting brand, Rare Beauty. Gomez, 33, recently took to an Ulta store in El Segundo, California to celebrate the launch of Rare Beauty onto the mega-retailer’s shelves, and Who What Wear caught up with the star to dish on all things beauty, award season, and what this new partnership means to her, personally.

Gomez’s hair is cut into a sleek, jaw-grazing bob tucked cleanly behind her ear when she looks around the room at the matching fringe on each journalist present. “Wait, do I need to get bangs?” she jokes before settling into rounds of interviews, when she describes the “surreal” experience of seeing her own products in a store she’d grown up with. “My mom was a makeup artist for this tiny modeling agency in Dallas, Texas, so she would go to all of the stores,” she tells WWW.

According to an article on People, the brand’s arrival at Ulta marks a breakthrough moment for the retailer as its largest debut to date, with Rare Beauty’s bestsellers, hero collections, and two Ulta-exclusive kits launching online and in 1,500 brick-and-mortar stores on February 1. This is the first time Gomez has expanded her brand into another retailer—having launched Rare Beauty on its own site and in Sephora in 2020—making hers one of the few celebrity beauty brands to be sold at both retail giants, next to Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs, and more.

However, it wasn’t industry domination that the “Bluest Flame” singer set out to achieve when she built her beloved brand. Makeup has been a core aspect of the multi-hyphenate’s artistic expression ever since childhood, when she followed her makeup artist mother around the glamorous aisles of local beauty stores—absorbing her mother’s techniques and noting the brands she’d use on models at shoots.