Huda Kattan
Huda Kattan, the CEO and founder of one of the world’s biggest cosmetics brands, Huda Beauty, originally started her career in finance. When she realised it wasn’t for her she relocated to LA to train as a makeup artist. She started a blog in 2010 with make-up tutorials and beauty hacks to get her name out and soon had an A-list celebrity clientele.
It was only when she created her own eyelashes because she couldn’t find what she was looking for that her blog took off as readers kept asking where they can buy them from, and Huda Beauty was born. She went into business with her sister Mona and Alya Kattan with Alya investing $6,000 into the brand so that she could make her first batch of eyelashes
She launched Huda Beauty with her eyelashes in Sephora in Dubai Mall in 2013 making eyelash application part of a mainstream beauty ritual. The launch immediately shattered records in the Middle East and soon after in the United States. She continues to run the business with her sisters, with Mona Kattan as global president and Alya as co-founder and chief Instagram officer. Her husband Chris is also COO.
Huda Beauty range now offers a vast range of lip, eye and face products and her business is now valued at $1.2 billion. Her products are now available worldwide at retailers including Harrods, Selfridges and Cult Beauty and NYKAA. She earns an estimated £158 million a year was ranked number 37 out of 60 on America's Richest Self-made women in July 2018. She is also one of Time magazine 25 most influential people on the internet in the world.
In early 2019 Huda did a brand campaign on body positivity. “We have a mission here and it really is to make people feel welcome in beauty. To make them feel like everyone is a part of. It’s not just about skin tone and skin colour – it’s so much deeper. We’re here to tell everyone who has something unique about themselves that they are a part of this conversation, are leading the conversation and are the future of beauty.”
2019 saw her launch several new products including her Nude eyeshadow palettes and her first ever eyeliner, the Life Liner which took Huda and her team nearly three years to perfect. Huda was adamant about the cut of the brush to make sure consumers could create their perfect winged look without the line becoming too thick or clumpy. She was so adamant that it took the team roughly three months to create just the brush.
Her most loved product is the Mercury Retrograde eyeshadow palette. At the start of 2018 Huda and team were hard at work trying bring Huda’s vision of a palette inspired by Crystal Aurora Borealis (Crystal AB) to life. Crystal AB is a clear crystal with an iridescent coating that reflects striking pink, purple and blue hues when moved in contact with the light. Creating a palette that would give our eyes the same multi-colored, iridescent effect posed an exciting but also difficult new challenge for the team. When the team was finally at the point of finalising the product and on their way back to Dubai from weeks spent in the lab someone said, “Creating this palette has been so challenging it’s like we’re in Mercury Retrograde.” Turns out they were. It was March 2019 and Mercury Retrograde was, in fact, in full effect. Thus, the palette assumed its name and it speaks for itself.