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Eva Longoria welcomes a special guest in her new podcast from iHeartMedia’s My Cultura Network, Connections with Eva Longoria. The celebrated actress, producer, and humanitarian sat down with Huda Kattan, founder of Huda Beauty, a beauty brand valued at over $1 billion.
The longtime friends connected over a candid conversation on diversity and representation across the beauty industry. Longoria and Kattan also spoke about teaching self-love to their children in a world of FaceTune and plastic surgery and how their beauty routines have changed post-pandemic. Huda also explains why Huda Beauty no longer uses photoshop in their ad campaigns.
“My daughter, she’s ten now, and I remember sitting and watching her taking photos. She refused to take a photo without a Snapchat filter as if it was normal,” Kattan tells Longoria, referring to how she is parenting around social media and photo filters. “I realized that it’s actually normal to her generation, and it’s not being real- which is normal. Not being real is what they expect to see.”
“Especially for girls – I feel that way with my stepdaughters as well, to grow up in this world where they know how to Facetune – [I think] ‘Wait, what are you doing?!’” Eva added.
According to Huda, after the pandemic, she oversimplified her beauty routine to feel her best. “I think previous to COVID, we were beautifying for others, beautifying for ‘the gram,’ we were beautifying for the events we were going to, we were beautifying for the outward world,” she says. “I think COVID really put things differently because you had to fall in love with makeup again. You couldn’t share it with the world – nobody wanted to hear it, nobody cared. The first few weeks, I got rid of all my nails, I stopped doing my hair, my hair was curly.”
Longoria revealed that she grew her gray hair and stopped sharing content with her makeup done. “I don’t even realize it until there are so many comments, saying, ‘Oh Eva, I love your no-makeup!’... It really was not intentional; I thought, ‘Oh my god, look, I’m cooking with [my son], this is a cute movement,’ and I posted it,” the actress and businesswoman say. “Then the feedback of the thirst from people going ‘Oh, I like seeing your real face’ –I didn’t realize what an impact it would have”
Although Huda’s company is about selling makeup, she says that there is a more powerful message behind her brand and that it begins with Huda Beauty’s no-photoshop policy. “I am always pushing to do no photoshop. If the makeup is good, show it. Also, I don’t like how we use models… I do think it’s nice to show real people using the products. I think we should be a little bit more honest in the beauty industry,” she says.
“I have a story about a brand. It was a beautiful mascara campaign, and I was seventeen at the time. I went to the counter, and I said, ‘I want these lashes.’ They said, ‘it’s not mascara, it’s false lashes’… and that’s when things were put into perspective for me that ads were made to be the most sensationalized form of the product they need to sell …. [Huda Beauty] just does the mascara –no photoshop,” she assures.
Please note quotes have been edited and condensed for clarity. Listen to Connections with Eva Longoria here!