• Huda Kattan is trying to stop “toxic beauty standards” from spreading online.
• Kattan suggested on Instagram that these standards are created by beauty companies and influencers.
• She’s now created a petition to require beauty brands to label edited photos and advertisements.
• Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Huda Kattan is on a mission to stop “toxic beauty standards.”

In late February, the Huda Beauty founder took to Instagram to call out advertisements that promote changing the appearance of your body through photo-editing apps. Days later, she shared a message about feeling like you don’t measure up to “standards of what everyone else looks like on Instagram.”

Now, Kattan has created a petition to make it mandatory for beauty brands to disclose when their photos and advertisements have been edited.

Huda Kattan suggested that ‘unrealistic beauty standards’ are being created by beauty companies and influencers

On Saturday, Kattan released a YouTube video titled “STOP Toxic Beauty Standards.” At the start of the 8-minute clip, she said she’s been rethinking how she uses her platforms and influences her audience.

She also reflected on feeling “ugly,” “unworthy,” and like she didn’t belong when she first entered the beauty industry.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was wearing makeup to kind of cover up who I was because I felt like I wasn’t enough and I had to become somebody else,” Kattan said. “And that’s the amazing, transformational power of makeup. The danger is when we don’t understand that we don’t need it to be the same person — but that’s not what we’re told.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp5tYlL7aso

According to Kattan, consumers are instead encouraged to “look a certain way” and match criteria that “big beauty companies have created so that they can get us to buy things.”

While Kattan noted that she feels the beauty industry is “so amazing” and has changed her life, she said she worries that some “ugly aspects of the industry” are “going to get worse” if they’re not changed soon. She specifically called out people entering the industry who are “literally not caring at all about beauty,” but “wanting to make money.”

“It’s fine if people want to make money,” Kattan said. “We’re not mad at anybody for trying to make a livelihood. We’re not mad. Lord knows I’ve had a lot of success with my brand, and I’m forever grateful for that, for so many things, for so many reasons.”

“The problem is when we create a rhetoric, a story, telling people that they’re not good enough, telling people that they need something in order to be beautiful, and that they’re unworthy and they’re ugly,” she said. 

A post shared by Huda Kattan (@huda)

The makeup mogul says consumers don’t need to purchase any product — including her own — to be beautiful

She also argued that consumers need to “democratize beauty,” while brands need to be honest and stop “selling an unattainable beauty standard.”

Kattan noted that some might find her stance hypocritical, as she uses Botox and fillers. But the brand founder said she “owns it” and tells her fans every time she has a procedure done.

At the end of her video, Kattan argued that brands should be required to label edited photos online the same way influencers are. She said consumers should “demand that the FTC starts to regulate these things because the reality is people don’t even know what they’re buying into anymore.”

She’s since created a petition to ‘make a change’ in the industry

The petition is titled “Beauty Brands Must Disclose If An Image Has Been Edited When Posting On Social Media.”

“The EXTREME Photoshop and over-editing have created unrealistic standards of beauty, and it has gone way too far!” the petition says. “We need to know what’s real in the ads we see on the internet; otherwise, we don’t know what we are really being sold!”

“We are not asking brands to stop Photoshopping (although less would be great!)” it continues. “All we want is for brands to disclose what they are doing to their images!”

At the time of writing, more than 3,500 people have signed.

Representatives for Huda Kattan did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.