Huda’s New Concealer Is The Most Intriguing Makeup Launch This Year

Beauty lovers everywhere, it’s time to celebrate! Today, beloved beauty brand, queen of all things colour and quality, Huda Beauty, has released its biggest launch of the year: #FauxFilter Luminous Matte Liquid Concealer. It's described as a medium-to-full buildable coverage concealer with a creamy, crease-proof, no-flashback formula. In a time when it feels like every brand is trying their hands at sheer foundation with SPF, it’s nice to see Huda Kattan and her brand do something a little different. As a self-professed concealer snob, this is highly up my alley.

I was lucky enough to get to spend a rainy May afternoon in New York with Kattan, who explains to me how you can somehow be both "luminous" and "matte" at the same time, why she created concealer, and what beauty trends she’s hopes will never make it back in style.

"It’s so funny, when my team were asking me these questions, they were like, 'What are we going to name it?'" Kattan shares. "And I was like, 'Oh, it’s kind of setting matte, it’s kind of luminous.’ And so we ended up going with ‘luminous matte,’" she explains. "But it is contradictory." Usually, products require a user to decide between being matte or being glowy, but not here. Throughout our conversation, Kattan and I spitballed on the perfect way to describe the effect the concealer has on skin. At one point, she gave me the ultimate compliment: My skin, but in a bottle. “You have a beautiful glow. You're luminous matte.”

Readers, I wanted to screech and promptly run into the streets of the Lower East Side, but somehow I didn’t. A beauty founder wanting to bottle your skin sounds like both a compliment, but also the start of a truly great horror movie (call me, Jason Blum)! Eventually, we settled on "matte marble," or even better, "velvet sateen." No, Velvet Sateen is not a drag queen…yet. Feel free to take that name, it’s free. As a makeup concept, "luminous matte" is more about how the light hits your face after the product is used, not the ingredients.

We bonded over the fact that ten years ago, neither of us imagined what the modern beauty landscape would look like. When Kattan was starting with her blog over a decade ago, she was a pioneer in the way we talked about technique and application on the internet. But now, rules truly do not exist.

"It’s almost like in beauty, nothing's off the table right now, you know what I mean? And I think that’s what's cool: Anybody can bring in a trend and it might work for some people, [or] it might not," she explains. "I think the last decade was actually a really interesting one because it went through this surge in makeup, and social-media makeup. I hope that Instagram brow does not make a comeback. It hasn’t completely left the scene yet, but…"

That doesn’t mean the specific aesthetic — harsh, bulky, overly-sculptured InstaBrow of the mid-2010s — is not still around. As always, a trend takes a long time to reach the masses. The style doesn’t work for everyone, and modern beauty is about figuring out what works for you and doing that, not just continuing the same as everyone else. I've found, people always want their brows to look like somebody else’s — I know, I want my brows to look like Bosco’s.

As far as the beauty trends that have emerged that Kattan can’t get enough of, she’s loving the emerging of 70’s-style high blush application: "Blush is definitely making a big comeback, as we know, but I think people are going to go harder on it as well." One thing that Kattan has just recently started doing was draping, or 'blush contouring' — the technique of applying blush in a C-shape from temples to the apples of your cheeks.

She's also into the fact that people are baking like drag queens again, and we bonded over our mutual love for what is known in my household as the Super Bowl of Drag. Kattan explains that RuPaul’s Drag Race had a massive impact on her when it came to learning about makeup: "When I would get my period, I’d be home, watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. I learned how to contour my nose from that. It was just like for me, contouring, nobody does it better than queens."

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