Main properties of the VANDELS sample (black) and of the objects with log(M_star/M_⊙) > 9.5 (red). The spectroscopic redshifts are from VANDELS DR4, stellar masses (M_star) have been estimated with BEAGLE as discussed in Sect. 3, and the UV magnitudes (M_UV) and slopes (β) have been measured from the observed photometry (Sect. 2.1). The green continuous line in the top right panel shows the M_star distribution for all CANDELS objects at z = 2 − 5 in UDS and GOODS-South from Santini et al. (2015), scaled by a factor of 4 to take the target sampling of the spectroscopic survey into account.