Mona Kattan’s scent of success as she rolls out a new perfume in Dubai

Mona Kattan’s scent of success as she rolls out a new perfume in Dubai

When beauty mogul and entrepreneur Mona Kattan invited you to her basement library at her swanky villa in Palm Jumeirah, you were forgiven for expecting rows of leather-bound books neatly stacked together under warm lighting. But the trailblazer Kattan, co-founder of the multi-million-dollar makeup empire Huda Beauty and Kayali Fragrances with over 3million followers on Instagram alone, is no traditionalist. As you descended down a set of narrow stairs into her warmly-lit basement in her posh mansion, you were greeted with a heady aroma of a thousand fragrances. Instead of a literary trove, the walls were lined with sleek shelves holding rows and rows of glass bottles in different shapes and colors, each containing a unique scent of various price ranges. Some of the bottles were so vintage that they were no longer available in stores anymore. “We are in my perfume library basement right now, and it’s my collection that I have been collecting forever. I started collecting fragrances at the age of 14, and I have become more and more obsessed over the years, especially during Covid-19. I became crazy, like borderline insane,” said Kattan in an exclusive interview with Gulf News. Iraqi-American Kattan looked around her “perfume