Huda Kattan was born on October 2, 1983, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Iraqi immigrant parents, Ibrahim Kattan and Susu Al Qazzaz, who had come to the United States as academics. She is one of four children, and her sisters Mona and Alya later became central figures in her business, with Mona becoming a co-founder of Huda Beauty and the founder of the fragrance brand Kayali, and Alya taking on a leading role in the company’s social media strategy, according to her Wikipedia biography.

Kattan spent part of her childhood in Tennessee and Massachusetts before her family relocated to Dubai in 2006, a move that eventually placed her at the center of the city’s emerging beauty and influencer scene, as detailed in a case study by Femfounded. That relocation, following years of moving between US states as her parents’ careers shifted, shaped the multicultural identity she later built her brand around.

Kattan earned a business administration and finance degree, then took a brief, unfulfilling detour into corporate and recruitment work in Dubai before deciding the traditional finance path was not for her, per her Wikipedia profile. She subsequently enrolled at the Joe Blasco Makeup Academy in Los Angeles to train formally as a makeup artist, a decision she has described as life-altering.

After building a client list that included celebrities such as Eva Longoria and Nicole Richie, Kattan returned to Dubai and worked as a professional makeup artist for Revlon, gaining the technical grounding and industry contacts that would later underpin her own brand, according to the same Wikipedia account of her career history.

In April 2010, on the advice of her sister Alya, Kattan launched a WordPress beauty blog called “Huda Beauty,” posting makeup tutorials and product reviews that quickly built a large following across the Middle East, per Femfounded’s account of the company’s founding.

In 2013, funded by a $6,000 loan from Alya that Kattan has said she had to beg for, she launched her first physical product, a false-eyelash line sold through Sephora Dubai. Sephora had projected the lashes would sell around 7,000 units over a full year; they sold out in one week, immediately signaling the commercial potential of the Huda Beauty brand.

Huda Beauty grew from that eyelash launch into a full cosmetics line spanning eyeshadow palettes, lipsticks, foundations and concealers, with the company’s Forbes profile citing more than 100 products and annual sales of roughly $200 million.

The clearest external validation of that growth came in December 2017, when private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners invested approximately $200 million for a 16 percent minority stake in Huda Beauty, a deal that valued the company at $1.2 billion and made it one of the first billion-dollar beauty brands to emerge from the Middle East, according to Femfounded’s reporting.

Kattan’s public profile grew alongside her business. In 2017, Forbes named her one of the ten most powerful influencers in beauty, and Time included her on its list of the 25 most influential people on the internet, according to her Wikipedia entry.

She went on to appear on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list in 2020 and BBC’s 100 Women list in 2023, recognition that tracks a social media following that had grown into the tens of millions of followers, per the same source. That combination of business credibility and cultural visibility is part of what distinguishes her from many other beauty founders.

Kattan’s commercial reach has run in the opposite direction from a typical celebrity endorser: rather than fronting other companies’ products, she has built one of the beauty industry’s most valuable sponsored-content platforms in her own right. In 2017, she was ranked first on an influencer Instagram rich list with an estimated $18,000 charged per sponsored post, according to her Wikipedia biography.

On the retail side, Huda Beauty has built exclusive and semi-exclusive partnerships with major beauty retailers, with Sephora serving as its primary mass-market retail partner alongside Boots, Selfridges and Cult Beauty, distribution relationships referenced in coverage of the brand from Yahoo News.

Beyond the core Huda Beauty cosmetics line, Kattan and her sister Mona launched the fragrance brand Kayali in 2018, expanding the family’s business beyond makeup into perfume, per the Forbes company profile.

In June 2025, Kattan completed a buyback of TSG Consumer Partners’ minority stake in Huda Beauty, returning the company to full founder ownership for the first time since the 2017 investment. “This brand was built on passion, creativity, and a desire to challenge the beauty industry,” she said in comments reported by Gulf News, which also reported the announcement was made via an Instagram story titled “We Bought Huda Beauty Back.”

Kattan has not publicly disclosed a detailed personal real estate portfolio. The most significant physical asset tied to her name is corporate rather than personal: Huda Beauty is headquartered in Dubai Production City, where the company runs its corporate offices and creative studios, according to Femfounded’s case study of the business.

That pattern fits the broader shape of her wealth, which is concentrated in equity rather than visible trophy assets. Following the 2025 buyback of TSG’s stake, Kattan holds full ownership of Huda Beauty, making her stake in the company itself, rather than any disclosed real estate holdings, her single largest asset.