Huda Kattan Launches No-Makeup Makeup With Glowish
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Huda Kattan, the mega beauty influencer known for her elaborate and full-coverage makeup looks, has gone low-key in quarantine.
Kattan said during the coronavirus pandemic she, like most people, was wearing less makeup. Unlike most people, it led her to develop another brand.
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This one is called Glowish, and launches June 1 on HudaBeauty.com and at Sephora with a small range meant to infuse makeup with skin care to give users a no-makeup makeup look. Glowish’s first products are Multidew Skin Tint, which comes in 13 shades and costs $37, and Soft Radiance Bronzing Powder, which comes in five shades and costs $31, and corresponding makeup brushes.
“It’s for all of us honestly. It’s for the light/medium girl or the full-glam girl when she wants to put something else on as another option. Today actually, I put it on top of my full glam, too, because it’s just so luminous,” Kattan said during a video interview.
Glowish’s products contain a minimum of 80 percent natural ingredients and are housed in postconsumer recycled packaging. They contain skin care-oriented ingredients, like Damascus rose oil and red bell pepper extract, which is meant to protect skin from blue light, Kattan said.
It took a while for Kattan, who started her beauty business by launching false eyelashes, to get on board with Glowish’s less-is-more concept.
“It was supposed to be a concept of weekend skin,” she said. “My team came to me, and was like, ‘on the weekend people don’t really glam, so we want to do this idea of barely-there makeup.’ I was like, ‘well, I think it depends on who you ask, because I feel some people when they go out on the weekend, they’re doing full glam.’”
“I wasn’t sold in the beginning. Light makeup? Like, eh, not really — I have a few tinted moisturizers that I use, but very little,” Kattan said.
But after a six-month-long internal debate and a lab sample that Kattan says didn’t move when she applied it to her face — “my whole problem with tinted moisturizers, they just move all over the place” — she was sold. Glowish’s Multidew Skin Tint contains ethically sourced mica, Kattan said, which allows for glow with a less slippery finish than a traditional skin tint.
Marketing materials for Glowish were inspired by quarantine-era yoga pants, Kattan noted. “When you’re not photoshopping images in a photo shoot at all — that was a mistake — I was like, ‘this shows my underwear,’” she said. “But it did represent us at the time in quarantine.”
During COVID-19, “the purpose behind makeup changed for me,” Kattan said.
“I felt like before it was more outward, it was more about everyone else having to see me in a certain way, having to glam a certain way, and it became very much about me wanting to feel good for myself and wanting to put my face on because I wanted to look good for me,” she said. She spent a lot of time going through old products for inspiration, and realized that she didn’t want to have to be all glam or no glam.
“Why is it one or the other, why can’t I have my moments where I just do a little flick and put a little individual lash on the corner, I put a lip stain on and just a little Glowish and bronzer — that was my glam honestly during COVID[-19], like the whole time, and I felt sexy,” Kattan said.
Glowish is Kattan’s fourth product line. She launched with Huda Beauty, expanded into fragrance with Kayali, and debuted skin care line Wishful in early 2020. She is back in the chief executive officer seat as of March, according to LinkedIn, and is open to launching more brands. Former CEO Nathalie Kristo is said to have left the company.
Kattan is open to launching more brands — but not to fill white space. “I was actually sitting with Martin Brock, the new CEO of Sephora, a few months ago and he was asking me a lot of questions,” she recalled. He was like, ‘you know, it’s really clear the products you guys create have a lot to do with a personal journey that [you’re] on.’”
Kattan said Brock’s assessment is spot-on, and that her product lines have come out with her phases of wanting to cover up or celebrate her skin.
“Recently, Sephora came to us and was like, you have to do hair care, hair care is where everyone is focused on,” Kattan said. But she has a complicated relationship with her hair, which breaks easily, she said, and can’t really see herself diving into the hair category.
“The retailers are pushing everyone to do hair care. I felt like I was doing something wrong by saying ‘no,’” Kattan said. “I have no passion toward it.”
For more from WWD.com, see:
How Huda Kattan Broke All the Rules and Built a Beauty Empire
Ami Colé Creates No-Makeup Makeup for Melanin-Rich Skin
Nutrafol CEO Says Wellness Products Should Be Backed by Science
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