She commands attention with her statement beauty looks, and it appears Huda Kattan is also able to command a pretty penny on Instagram – should she choose to. The Dubai beauty influencer and entrepreneur has topped Instagram's 2019 Rich List in the beauty category, in a ranking compiled by Instagram scheduling tool Hopper.
The founder of Huda Beauty has the ability to charge $91,300 (Dh335,344) for a sponsored post on the photo-sharing app, the report found, with Kattan worth an overall $45 million.
The American-Iraqi businesswoman was joined in the beauty top five by America's James Charles, US influencer Jeffree Star, Dutch make-up artist Nikki de Jager and Britain's Zoe Sugg.
But Kattan barely ever charges
While Kattan, 35, could rake in nearly $100,000 for a paid-for Instagram post, the star does not use her platform for sponsored content.
"I'm not looking to directly monetise our Instagram. Directly being able to do shoppable links – when that happens, sure, why not? But now, I don't want it to feel like it's not real," she told Entrepreneur magazine last year. "I don't think you should feel shame making money off that, as long as you're doing it really naturally as opposed to something that is forced."
Indeed, scrolling through both the Huda Beauty Instagram and Kattan's private account doesn't yield any sponsored posts. The star, who is a trained make-up artist, also revealed that she once turned down a $185,000 post as she "just couldn't do it".
"I had been looking at a car I was ready to buy, but I ended up turning it down," she said. "It was painful for me and my husband to reject it, because it was a lot of money. I know you have to identify it as an ad, but I just didn't feel comfortable with it. I thought about Oprah. I was like, would Oprah do that? No, she wouldn't."
Hopper’s Rich List, created using a mix of internal data, influencer rate cards and publicly available information, saw entrepreneur and reality TV star Kylie Jenner, 21, top the overall rankings for the second year in a row.
She can earn up to $1.2m for a sponsored post, according to Hopper, with the top five rounded out by Ariana Grande ($996,000), Cristiano Ronaldo ($975,000), Kim Kardashian ($910,000) and Selena Gomez ($886,000).
