Global Influencer Of The Year: Huda Kattan

She has close to 40 million Instagram followers, clocked 150 million YouTube views and owns a beauty brand with an estimated value of US$1.2 billion. But as Huda Kattan, the woman behind those staggering statistics, shares her entrepreneurial story, it’s apparent that not one of those things came easy.

- Parizaad Khan Sethi

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Huda Kattan is currently the beauty world’s brightest star. She started as a beauty blogger in 2010 and launched her brand in 2013, earning her a massive global following. Her success has been celebrated widely, but nowhere more so than in the Middle East and South Asia—her Arabian style of makeup resonates strongly with brown women. She’s popularised that style world over, which is a near-miraculous phenomenon, as traditionally beauty ideals are passed from West to East, not the other way around. As Kattan gets ready to launch skincare next year, she talks about her entrepreneurial journey and the lessons she’s learned along the way.

WIDEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE

When Kattan started out as a beauty blogger, white influencers were the norm, a few African-American names were in the mix, but brown women were totally missing. Brown girls’ influences were a combination of Eastern and Western beauty ideals, so she ended up creating content that mixed a lot of approaches. “I’d talk about a lot of beauty ingredients that the West had never heard of but were so big in South Asian and Arab culture, like amla oil and henna. I was giving people the opportunity to have a different perspective.”

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