Huda Kattan Knows Exactly What Her Comments Section Wants

Huda Kattan reads her comment section. The founder and CEO of Huda Beauty knows a thing or two about going viral — whether it’s her brand’s matcha-green setting powder or the pressed powder PopSockets that blew up on TikTok this year. “We’re always listening,” she says. “It just makes sense to give the community what they want.”

For years, one request kept showing up over and over again: Turn the scent of Easy Bake into a perfume. After a limited-edition April Fool’s launch in 2024 — and more than 100 iterations with perfumer Hamid Merati-Kashani — it’s finally become a reality with Easy Bake Intense Eau de Parfum, Huda Beauty’s first official fragrance, launching May 28.

The Easy Bake Intense Eau De Parfum

Instead of directly copying the powder’s familiar white floral scent, Easy Bake Intense pulls it somewhere warmer, smokier, and more sensual. It opens with cherry — the dark, ripe kind, not the cough-syrupy kind — before the cinnamon bark starts cutting through with a woody, almost toasted warmth that becomes the backbone of the fragrance. As it dries down, the caramel milk and tuberose melt into each other, adding a musky creaminess that doesn’t smell overly edible. Then the vanilla bourbon settles in underneath, wrapping the whole thing in a warm, boozy richness.

“I wanted it to feel like a whole fragrance — every part of the scent connecting with each other — so we spent a lot of time rounding out the edges,” Kattan tells Bustle. “There were two main things that we added at the end that I felt really grounded the fragrance in an interesting way: the creaminess and the cinnamon. That's what makes it addictive.”

She’s not wrong. The longer it sits on your skin, the harder it becomes to stop smelling your wrist. Hours after I sprayed it on, the cherry note faded into the background, while the vanilla bourbon and tuberose lingered the longest, leaving behind a warm, indulgent, skin-like musk with a dash of sweetness underneath. “If you’re going to call something Easy Bake, you have to show up,” Kattan says — and this perfume absolutely does.

It’s the kind of scent that makes you feel miraculously put together at 8 a.m. on the F train, yet glamorous enough for dinner and drinks later that evening. According to Kattan, that day-to-night quality was built in from the beginning. “The top notes are so fresh — there’s that floral fruitiness — but then the base is really sexy,” she says.

The balance between sweet and sexy is what made the fragrance so difficult to categorize at first. “When we showed it to our retailers, they were like, ‘It’s in this weird place between floral and gourmand — you have to pick one,’” Kattan says. “We didn’t. It’s a floral gourmand, and that’s what we settled on.”

Good thing, because the tension between the two is exactly what makes the fragrance work. The sweetness is there, but so is the smokiness and the headiness. It never fully settles into one thing, which makes it feel much more interesting than your standard floral or dessert scent.

Huda Beauty’s Fragrance Era Starts Here

“People just want newness,” Kattan says. According to her, though, actually delivering that as a beauty brand is harder than it sounds. “Everyone wants the trend cycle repeated,” she says. “To break the mold is scary — it could be huge, or it could fall flat.”

For Kattan, fragrance felt like the right place to take that risk, especially after years of people asking for it in her comments. “Makeup will always be the essence of Huda Beauty,” she says. “I love the way you feel when you put something amazing on, but fragrance does that, too.” Instead of treating it like a separate category, she sees it as part of the same fantasy — another layer of transformation, the “final step of glam.”

And Easy Bake Intense is only the beginning. “There's going to be a whole universe we're going to create,” she says of future fragrance launches. “We have a very strong vision — it’s not going to be similar to other makeup brand fragrances, and it’s not going to be niche fragrances, either. We want to be different.”

The goal at the center of it all? “We always want people to feel sexy and powerful,” Kattan tells me. If Easy Bake Intense is any indication, Huda Beauty’s fragrance era won’t be subtle.