A source close to both stars says Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez will never rebuild the friendship they once shared, despite their recent Rare Beauty collaboration.
The two singers, who first met as seven-year-olds on the set of “Barney & Friends,” recreated their 2009 “Princess Protection Program” poster and revived their old webcam vlogs for Gomez’s beauty brand last week. The campaign was dreamed up by Tyra Booker, Rare Beauty’s assistant vice president of integrated marketing, who pitched it during her first week on the job.
“With over 500M+ views across every platform, it’s proved to be more than a beauty campaign but a cultural moment,” Booker wrote on LinkedIn, crediting the Rare Beauty team for giving her creative freedom. She explained the concept grew from the Disney-era friendship she had watched on YouTube as a child, with the team aiming to tap into that nostalgia.
“Best friends that are still making each other blush,” Booker wrote — a nod to the campaign’s tagline.
Behind the polished ad, however, the dynamic between Lovato, 34, and Gomez, 32, remains complicated. “Demi and Selena are not best friends. They’ve patched things up enough to be in a better place. They will never be as close as they once were,” the source said.
The distance between the former Disney Channel stars had been building for years. By 2020, Lovato had confirmed publicly that the two were no longer friends, though she added she would always have love for Gomez.
Their separate lives in 2025 only emphasized the gap. Lovato married musician Jordan “Jutes” Lutes, 35, on May 25 in Santa Barbara, California. Gomez wed music producer Benny Blanco, 38, in the same city just four months later on September 27. Neither singer attended the other’s wedding.
Still, Lovato had offered public well-wishes ahead of Gomez’s nuptials, saying she couldn’t be happier for her and wished her the best.
Signs of thawing emerged more recently. Gomez showed up for the opening night of Lovato’s tour in Orlando this past April, and the two were photographed together backstage.
Lovato later addressed the reconnection in an interview with Elle, acknowledging the long road between them. “There have been different chapters in our lives,” she said. “I’m happy to reach a place where we could collaborate and reconnect.”
The Rare Beauty shoot marks their first major public project together in nearly a decade, but those involved suggest the professional nature of the partnership shouldn’t be mistaken for a personal reconciliation. The source emphasized the campaign wasn’t even the singers’ own idea — it was Booker who pushed it forward based on fan nostalgia rather than any initiative from Lovato or Gomez themselves.
What began as a childhood friendship on a purple dinosaur set evolved into one of Disney’s most visible best-friend pairings during the late 2000s. They starred together in the 2009 Disney Channel original movie “Princess Protection Program,” traded jokes in backstage vlogs, and walked red carpets as an inseparable duo. Their bond became a touchstone for a generation of young viewers who followed their every move online. But as both women transitioned into solo music careers and navigated highly public personal struggles, their paths diverged sharply. Lovato’s battles with addiction and mental health played out in the headlines, while Gomez faced her own medical and emotional challenges; through it all, they rarely appeared together and sometimes seemed to occupy entirely separate universes within the same industry.
The Rare Beauty spot offers fans a carefully staged glimpse of what once was — the webcam framing, the playful banter, the direct callback to their teenage chemistry — without promising anything beyond the frame. For Booker, the marketing executive who made it happen, the numbers tell their own story about what audiences still want from the pair.
Lovato continues her tour with upcoming stops across North America.