The face of beauty
For me, make-up has always been a way to make myself feel more confident. Make-up can give you the feeling that you can take on the world. I’m a firm believer in the power of make-up; its transformative abilities to give you confidence and change the way you feel about yourself.
THERE’S A TRANSIENT QUALITY TO MAKE-UP, IN THAT WE SPEND TIME AND EFFORT ON SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T LAST FOR VERY LONG,
YET IT’S VERY SIGNIFICANT TO OUR IDENTITY. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS?
That’s the beauty of make-up — it allows you to be who you want to be at any moment with the option to be a different you just moments later. It’s totally liberating. The empowering quality of make-up is the transformative aspect. that we weren’t a serious brand. There was a lot of frustration when we began.
During meetings with distributors and retailers, they thought we were just some girls with a hobby.
But my sisters and I have always had a really big vision for the company and we didn’t give up on it.
We stayed focus on what we wanted to achieve and eventually Sephora in Dubai Mall decided to stock our lashes and we sold out that same day. Before that, there was a lot of time spent convincing people that we were a serious brand. It is super complex! Our latest launch, The Overachiever Concealer, was really challenging. We got it to a place that we thought was perfect and then we discovered that the formula was oxidising so we needed to go back to lab and start again. It was really, really stressful.
Our 3D Highlighter Palettes, for instance, took forever to create! Highlighters are everywhere and the challenge for us was introducing it in a way that would be interesting to people.
I really wanted to launch Highlighters and although we had this amazing formula, we still needed to find a way to package it and make it unique, which took a lot of time. We always try to differentiate ourselves from other brands so it was quite challenging to create a product that would stand out.
IS THERE A DIFFERENCE IN HOW PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE EAST VIEW BEAUTY AS COMPARED TO OTHER PLACES, AND HOW DOES HUDA BEAUTY ADAPT NOW THAT THE BRAND IS GLOBAL?
Beauty in the Middle East is very glamorous, and the women living in this region love to pamper themselves. Many women in Dubai go to the salon twice a week — to get our nails done, brows shaped, or hair blow-dried.
When it comes to skincare, we love natural ingredients such as using coconut oil to remove our makeup, castor oil for our brows, or using rose water as a toner.
As a company, what we value most is product, content and social media — and those three things are inherently intertwined at Huda Beauty — regardless of how big we have become. I am constantly inspired by the comments and requests we see on Instagram.
When it comes to creating new products, we always take into account what our social family is asking for. For example, when we were developing the #FauxFilter Foundation, I reached out to our Instagram audience because I wanted to understand what kind of coverage they wanted, what finish they wanted, how they chose foundation.
We had thousands of responses that helped guide us. They also helped with naming the foundation so our community really and truly helps with the creation of Huda Beauty products — more than they probably realise.