Exclusive: Huda Kattan Wants to Empower Women Through NFTs

Huda Kattan loves taking her passions to the next level. She took her love of makeup and turned it into Huda Beauty, a billion dollar makeup empire. To this day, her makeup and beauty products are stocked in more than 1500 stores worldwide. 

Now, she has another passion— web3 and NFTs. 

Kattan first entered the web3 space toward the end of 2021 when her husband sent her an NFT as a gift.

The NFT was World of Women, a collection currently revolutionizing the male-dominated NFT space through its art, diversity, and community.

Both her and her husband loved that the collection aligned with Kattan’s values.

"The World of Women community celebrates representation, inclusivity, and equal opportunities for all, something I’m also super passionate about," she said in a recent blog post. "So choosing to support artists from the World of Women community felt super authentic and natural to me."

Afterwards, she started to become more intrigued and did more research on NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and the metaverse.

“NFTs have given us the ability to distribute wealth in a way we’ve never seen,” Kattan said. “You can mint a project for hundreds of dollars and then later sell the asset for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” 

Some of her favorite NFT projects include Dead Fellaz, Doodles, and Bored Ape Yacht Club. 

While she already had a growing interest, Kattan said it was a conversation with a woman she met in the investment space that ultimately led her to fall down the rabbit hole completely.

“She was telling me about how there’s not enough women,” Kattan said “And that kind of pissed me off.”

That was when Kattan decided that she wanted to make waves in the NFT space and prove that women deserved a seat at the table. 

Kattan is excited about innovation, but she’s also realistic.

“That redistribution of wealth [through NFTs] is fascinating and I think it is wonderful and needed,” Kattan said. “But, the reality is not every project is going to that.”

She says not every project is going to succeed, and that's okay. But, it's important to do ample research to see if a project has potential.

The first question the beauty maven says she looks for when looking at an NFT project is: What is the utility?

When she mentions utility and non-fungible tokens as assets, she’s referring to the value that an NFT project returns to its owner for buying and holding longterm. 

Depending on the project, holders can be rewarded with exclusive access to merchandise or in-person events, membership in private communities, opportunities to be airdropped other NFTs, and much more.

“When an NFT has utility,” Kattan said. “It’s not just a pretty picture, it becomes so much more than art.”

Kattan says realistically, it’ll take time for mass adoption to happen. 

“The market is scary right now,” she says, referring to the current bear market. “We hear all these stories of people making money, but there’s another part that people think it’s a sham. It’s still very intimidating.” 

She thinks that many women still don’t feel confident in the crypto space and wants to empower women to get there.

“I think it’s going to be a slow change,” Kattan said, citing the lack of female representation at VeeCon. “But women coming to events like [Veecon] is very important.”

With many beauty and makeup brands making announcements to enter the metaverse or create their own NFTs, Kattan thinks it's important for brands to actually have genuine knowledge of and interest in web3 before jumping into the space.

“In my very humble and honest opinion, I don’t think they know what they’re doing in the space right now,” Kattan said. “They want to be relevant, to be seen, to be a part of the next generation of where the world is going.” 

However, she says that’s not enough of a reason to be in it.

“The space is so new and changing, in a year it’s going to be different,” she said. “So if you’re in it just to be in it, it’s really a big mistake.” 

When asked if she has an NFT project for Huda Beauty in the works, Kattan says she is taking her time to bring something of value.

“I want to launch a project for Huda Beauty, but I have a vision for what I want to give to my community,” she said. “It’s going to be all about THEM, not the company.”

She said many companies are not approaching NFTs the right way, but she will when the time comes. 

“I think when we end up doing NFTs,” Kattan said. “We’re not going to be doing what everyone else is doing.”

Watch the full interview with ONE37pm and Huda Kattan at Veecon here: