Daily Times

Beauty mogul Huda Kattan is speaking out against sexism in the industry. Featured on this year’s BBC 100 Women List, Kattan’s cosmetic business is worth over $1 billion, garnering over 50 million followers on Instagram.

“I think the beauty industry is sexist,” she says in an interview with BBC. “It objectifies women a lot of times. It really can boil women down to just their appearance.”

The Huda Beauty owner says these issues also carry over to social media.

She no longer thinks social platforms are beneficial to culture, commenting that a society that has always “been hard on women” has gone to new heights with beauty standards.

“When I go on social media, sometimes I feel I can never be good-looking enough. I can never have achieved enough.”

Kattan is often disregarded in business meetings for her company, with industry pros frequently undermining her.

“Oftentimes we’d be in a meeting and instead of making eye contact with me they would make eye contact with my husband and completely ignore me.”

As a response to these issues, Kattan has taken initiative to drive change in the beauty industry.

She has made it her priority to create products for deeper shades to match a wider variety of skin tones. This, however, is moving at a “snail’s pace.”

“I’ve been in the labs with the manufacturers and I’ve said to them, ‘I need a richer skin tone product’. And I’ve seen them literally put black pigment in, [but] people’s skins are made of many different tones.”

While she does mention a “lack of understanding” is a player in the circumstance, she urges for more education on skin tones.

The fight for representation is a continued effort since her upbringing in Tennessee.

“I think back sometimes to that little Middle Eastern brown girl in Tennessee – there’s still a lot of them out there in the world – and maybe seeing someone like me, they can feel a little bit represented.”