HUDA KATTAN Meet the

$1 billion queen of beauty

‘Guys, she’s just passed the millennium wheel… she’s 15 minutes away!” announces a senior member of Huda Kattan’s team. The 50 or so young women and men who stand before me fizz with corresponding excitement: jaws slacken, hands clasp over open mouths, legs turn to jelly. They have gathered here, at the top of London’s “Gherkin” building, to have an audience with their idol. Or, another way of putting it: their boss. You see they are all Huda Beauty make-up artists (none older than 30, I notice) who have come from make-up counters across the land. A platter of pastries and fresh fruit on cocktail sticks goes untouched. They are too excited to think about breakfast. Some of them have been up since 4am to be here. Not that you’d know. Their heavily made-up faces – plump matte lips, thick, defined eyebrows and cheekbones that glow with highlighter – eradicate any whisper of tiredness. They also do something else: they all… look. Exactly. The. Same. Carefully contoured and expertly airbrushed, they have what is known as “Huda Face” – an almost avatar-like complexion that is so flawless, it’s like an Instagram filter come to life.

And then… there she is… the 35-year-old make-up-artist-turnedentrepreneur Huda Kattan, standing in the doorway – all tumbling curls and Caramac skin with a smile as wide and open as a prairie landscape. To see her in the flesh is to see a living, breathing, primping, prodding embodiment of her brand; a God-like figure that her 30.1 million Instagram followers worship and live to emulate. So, OK, she’s an hour late, but no one seems to mind. Instead, they all scramble into a specially lit room that has been set up next door for professional selfies.“So we’re gonna slay,” Kattan explains, putting her arms around the first group, pouting fiercely, to which they slavishly follow suit.“And now we’re going to smile.” The group acquiesce. And for the third? “We’re gonna go silly!” To which they all mug outrageously for the camera before collapsing into girlie giggles. It’s a fine art, repeated robotically for the next half-hour, but Huda’s in her element. She doles out big hugs and copious eye contact to each person. Sadly I’m not so lucky. Because Kattan, I’m informed by one of her PR team,“doesn’t want to meet Cosmopolitan yet”. From appearing on This Morning to speaking at Harvard, it’s been a whirlwind month for Kattan, her sister, Mona, (global president of Huda Beauty), her husband, Chris Goncalo (COO of the company), and their entourage of travelling assistants, publicists and bodyguards. I decide to chance another encounter by heading to Selfridges at 8am on the day she’s doing a public appearance for 100 of her top beauty customers. Kattan arrives an hour and a half late, in a

green-sequinned, skin-tight Gucci jumpsuit and her hair held aloft in a thick, swishy ponytail. The crowd goes wild. But before I get to meet her, she’s dashing off again.

Having whacked on some tinted moisturiser and mascara en route, I suspect the appeal of Huda is a bit lost on me. I want to like her. I watched Huda Boss, her Keeping

Up With The Kardashians-style reality show on Facebook Watch, and you know what? It made me laugh. It was earthy, funny. Date night with her husband involved having fillers, while a YouTube tutorial I found showed her testing KY Jelly as a face primer.

But the celebrity circus around her? I just don’t get it. And from all the waiting and watching, right down to the strict food and music instructions Kattan issues for the Cosmopolitan photo shoot (she’s on a keto diet – which means Haribos are good, fruit is bad, allegedly), well… it’s all starting to look a bit Mariah Carey. I leave feeling frustrated and apprehensive about our forthcoming interview.

Two days later, however, and I’m snuggled under a blanket in her Knightsbridge hotel room giggling like a schoolgirl. Gone is the entourage and instead there is a soft, funny young woman. Huda Beauty is worth around $1 billion, and every penny of it is self-made. So where to begin? That’s easy… right at the very beginning.

In 1983, Huda Kattan was born in Oklahoma, the third of her Iraqi immigrant parents’ four children. When she was two years old, the family moved to Cookeville, a small, predominantly Caucasian town around an hour outside Nashville where Huda quickly learned the value (and pain) of being different.

“From the beginning, I didn’t feel as though I fitted in,” she explains.

“I had this sense of not being good enough”

“Some kids went out of their way to make me feel like an outsider. They didn’t invite me to things and made fun of me for being hairy ‘like a monkey.’ I didn’t know how to react because I just wanted to be liked.”

In an attempt to fit in, at age eight she made the decision to start using her Western-sounding middle name, Heidi. “I always felt like an Arab in America. Then, when I moved to the Middle East [she moved to Dubai after university, and still calls it home today], I felt like an American Arab. It was a feeling of not belonging anywhere.

“I had this sense of not being good enough… I’m sorry,” she whispers, pausing to wipe away tears. “I’m happy I went through it, because honestly it’s shaped me.”

But perhaps what shaped her most of all was… make-up. She was nine when she started experimenting.“I wasn’t super-cute, but Mona was like a doll – always in beauty pageants – and I always wanted to do her make-up, but she would never let me. In those days, it wasn’t like it is now. I mean, my daughter [Nour Giselle] is seven and she knows how to put on eyeliner. She doesn’t even take a photo without a filter. Growing up, we didn’t have the money for make-up so I got into DIYs, like, ‘What can you do with a lemon?’”

Exactly how tight were things financially? “I used to wear handme-downs. I remember everyone at school had these cool Nikes that were black with white checks and I wanted them so bad, but we couldn’t afford it. Finally, they went on sale for $9.99 and my parents were like,‘You can get them now,’ but they were four sizes too big,” she says with a laugh.“They would still not fit me today.”

As is often the case with first-wave immigrant parents, Huda’s father, in particular, was ambitious for his daughter. That meant a “creative” career was never an option.“I was a creative kid but suppressed it as I was self-conscious about my ideas. My dad [an engineering professor] wanted me to be an engineer. I was like, ‘That is not happening.’ I liked business, though – my grandfather on my mum’s side was a respected businessman in Iraq. After my degree in finance, I started working at Robert Half Recruitment in Michigan. I thought, ‘I’m never going to be an investment banker, so I’ll start as a recruiter.’”

The money was good, but once again, she didn’t fit in. Despite uprooting her life and transferring to the Dubai office in early 2009, four months later she was fired. “My boss turned to me one day and said,‘You don’t belong here,’” she recalls. “He was awful to me because I used to dress up and I liked make-up. It was 100% Legally Blonde.”

It’s telling that a speech she gave at her graduation was entitled “Don’t do what you don’t love, do what you love.” Losing her job in recruitment was the end of a career she tried out of filial duty, but the beginning of a new career in an industry she had always loved: beauty. She retrained to be a make-up artist and, just like that, make-up came back into her life.“When I became a make-up artist,” she says smiling, “I finally felt like I belonged.”

Graft and hustle were the footnotes to the start of Kattan’s make-up artistry career – along with a bit of luck and ear-to-the-ground savvy. It was in 2010 that, while working as a make-up artist for Revlon in the day, Kattan started make-up blogging by night – long before the term influencer had entered the lexicon.

“Had my husband not supported me I wouldn’t have been able to work as a make-up artist and a blogger,” she concedes.“There were tough times. Mona was the one who gave me the idea for the blog; she was like,‘People are talking about your lashes.’ With a $6,000 loan from her sister, Ayla, Kattan started by creating her own-brand eyelashes, which were famously worn by Kim Kardashian.

“We didn’t really become a company until 2015 [when Chris also came on board], and even then, we didn’t know if we were going to make it. In the beginning, we were packaging 20,000 pairs of lashes ourselves. My dad would come over and we’d form this assembly line – we would get such bad cuticles, we’d have to put bandages on our hands!”

The lashes were a sell-out in Sephora, which, alongside her YouTube tutorials, put Kattan on the map. Many credit her with the current vogue for contouring – long before a Kardashian went near a blending brush or a foundation stick. The company now has 193 employees across the globe, and the range includes everything from dazzling eye palettes to make-up brushes and cosmetic cases.

So is Kattan ruthless as a boss? “I had to become an alpha female. I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “I’m definitely the tough one in my family and everyone [else] is so soft. I feel like a lot of them get taken advantage of, while I’m like the shark – I go in for the kill. But I’m a different person at home – I like being happy and having fun, but most of the time at work I have to be very serious. Working with your family is like your best dream and your worst nightmare in one.”

As proof, she explains that, at the start, her workaholic tendencies almost led to the end of her marriage: “I’m really obsessed with working

“Part of my drive comes from my insecurities”

– like my dad – and in the beginning, Chris and I almost got divorced.” What changed? “He got a perforated ulcer and was in the hospital for two weeks. I think he thought I was going to leave him and go back to work, but I stood by him every single day. He thought of me differently then. Family always comes first.”

Much of Kattan’s cross-cultural, crossplatform appeal lies in her authenticity. She creates premium products she loves to wear herself; she never posts about products she doesn’t use, and even when she does, she won’t accept money. Isn’t it tempting? “Oh my God, somebody just came to us with a deal worth over $10 million for the year and it’s really hard to say no to those things.”

But do those brand values conflict with the end result if everyone looks, well, identical? What happened to celebrating individuality? “I think it’s really important to celebrate flaws,” she argues.“But first our goal is to create a look. Then hopefully we’ll get people to embrace more and more of who they are, slowly but surely.

“I was talking to someone who said, ‘You seem so perfect,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so flawed!’ People don’t realise I’m dealing with so many insecurities all the time; that part of my drive comes from all of these ridiculous insecurities that I’ve had since I was a child.”

Part of which, one suspects, manifests in the amount of surgery she has openly admitted to having. This includes a nose job and a boob job, done together when she was 30 years old.“I have fillers in my cheeks, face and lips, but I’ve been dissolving them recently because I want it more natural,” she explains.“I’m not ashamed [of cosmetic work] – I think if you want to do it, you should not be ashamed. I did my nose and my boobs together, when we launched the brand, because I had breast-fed and felt ashamed to show them to my husband. I was scared when I went to do it, but I’m really happy [with the results]. I know a lot of celebrities deny they’ve had work but I don’t understand why you would lie.”

As our time together draws to a close, I unfurl myself from the blanket I realise we have been sharing the entire time. We kiss goodbye; she squeezes me tight. And suddenly I get it: Huda Kattan’s appeal is that she is one of us – tough, complex, fragile… all at the same time. A fighter who has truly earned her place at the top.