mac cosmetics

via MAC’s Instagram

After a Change.org petition, countless requests from makeup mavens, and months of anticipation, we finally get to see what the highly coveted Selena for MAC lipstick will look like before it ends up on everyone’s vanities.

MAC and Selena’s official Instagram pages shared a snap red lipstick with a pink undertone named “Como La Flor” after one of her many hits. The new lippie is encased in purple—the same shade the singer sported on stage during her final performance at the Houston Astrodome. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as more products are expected to fill out the rest of the collection when it’s released in October.

Getty Images via Cosmopolitan

“I wanted the colors to be about her personally, what she wore on and offstage,” Suzette Quintanilla, the songstress’s sister and curator of the limited edition collection, explained in the caption. “She has been gone for 21 years already, and for this collaboration to happen, it’s pretty much incredible. It just shows the love her fan base has even though she’s gone; that her music still lives on and her legacy has grown tremendously since she’s passed. It’s a great honor to have MAC collaborate with Selena’s name and her fans—FOR her fans.”

To say the collection was a long time in the making is an understatement. The collaboration initially got its start back in 2013 when Patty Rodriguez reached out to the beauty brand about it. “It was just me saying, ‘Hey, I’m a Latina consumer and as a demographic, we will purchase three times more beauty products than any other consumer in the country,'” she told Cosmopolitan.com. “‘We’re your biggest group and it would only make sense for a popular brand like MAC to create a line for Selena Quintanilla, a singer who means so much to us.’” MAC said they would take the idea into consideration, but nothing seemed to come of it.

The fan-fueled frenzy began building two years later, thanks to a photo manipulation by Jose Figueroa who superimposed the singer’s logo over a tube of the brand’s lipstick. Rodriguez was shocked to find out it was a fake, but the image sparked the ideas to get more voices involved with the cause via a Change.org petition (full disclosure: I supported this petition) in honor of the 20th anniversary of her passing. After scoring thousands of signatures in less than a week, Rodriguez passed the petition along to MAC, stating, “I hope you don’t hate me yet, but this is not the last you’re going to hear of me. It’s not just my voice anymore. Here’s 10,000 voices all asking the same thing.” MAC got the message loud and clear this time and connected with the Quintanilla family through Rodriguez, thus giving birth to one of the most anticipated collaborations of the year!

It’s no surprise, as Latinas have become a huge sector in the marketplace. According to a Nielsen consumer report, most households reduced spending on personal care, except for Latinos who increased their spending in the same time period. In fact, they made up 16% of total U.S. sales in beauty in 2014, including 13% of cosmetic sales.

And personally, I grew up listening to the Tejano star when I lived in Texas. While songs like “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom”, “Baila Esta Cumbia,” “Besitos,” and more became hits, it was her sense of glamor that appealed to her fans before and after her death. Or as Rodriguez explained to Cosmo, “Selena is important to me because she represents the Latina woman. Her Spanish wasn’t that great, which is like a lot of us. We might speak imperfect Spanish, but we can code-switch between American culture and Latino culture, and switch from English to Spanish. And she was representative of all the things that Latinas love about ourselves. We are the big lips, the thick hair, curves, so many different skin colors, and we’re proud of all of that.”

We certainly are!

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