Rihanna
Rihanna was declared a national hero of Barbados at the ceremony that made it a republic, and is richer from cosmetics than from music. She was born Robyn Fenty in Saint Michael, left school at sixteen when a producer on holiday heard her, and was signed in New York at seventeen. The recording career is one of the largest in the history of the singles chart - fourteen number ones in the United States, and a run through Umbrella, Rude Boy, We Found Love and Diamonds that defined mainstream pop production for a decade. Her last studio album came out in 2016. What she did afterwards is the more interesting half. Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 with forty foundation shades at a time when the industry offered dark-skinned customers almost nothing, sold extraordinarily, and forced competitors to expand their ranges within a year - a commercial decision with more effect on an industry than most campaigns. Savage X Fenty applied the same argument to lingerie sizing. She was made an ambassador for Barbados in 2018 and a national hero in November 2021, when Barbados removed the British monarch as head of state and installed Sandra Mason as president, the first country to become a republic in nearly thirty years. Her Clara Lionel Foundation, named for her grandparents, funds climate resilience in the Caribbean and education. She has given sustained attention to disaster financing for small island states, which is an unglamorous subject and the one that actually determines whether a hurricane bankrupts a country. The delay on a new album is now a standing joke among her audience and has lasted longer than most recording careers.
- Lived: 1988 CE – ?
- Nationality: Barbadian
- Roles: singer, entrepreneur
