I remember seeing Huda Beauty start taking up real space in Sephora and wanting her to win before I even knew whether I wanted every product, which sounds funny now, but at the time it felt strangely personal.

I spent most of my formative years in Jordan before moving back to the US in 2015, and my relationship with looking Middle Eastern wasn’t always uncomplicated, there were periods when I loved that I looked Arab, and others when I wanted to look less Arab, or at least a little less obviously so.

I didn’t have some profound explanation for any of that at the time, I was young, moving between cultures, and taking in completely different ideas of what beautiful was supposed to look like, depending on where I was and who I was around.

Then there was Huda.

Here was a Middle Eastern woman becoming enormous in an industry I already loved, not adjacent to beauty, not treated like a novelty, but sitting right there alongside the brands I had always thought of as the establishment, and I remember feeling almost protective of her success.

I wanted to support her because I wanted her to keep winning.

Looking back, that contradiction is probably what stays with me most, I could be going through a period where I felt uncomfortable with certain features that made me look Arab, while at the exact same time feeling incredibly proud that an Arab woman was becoming one of the people defining global beauty.

I didn’t call it representation then, I don’t think I consciously connected the two at all, I just knew seeing her there made me proud.

I think something shifted in me before I really understood what was shifting, there was something reassuring about watching a woman who felt culturally familiar become aspirational without seeming like she had to make that familiarity disappear first.

Years later, I’m now on the other side of that relationship in a very small way, I create beauty content myself, women watch what I use, what I buy, what I recommend, what I change and what I decide is worth spending money on, and that has made me think much more seriously about influence.

I genuinely love beauty, I love good hair, skincare, makeup, fashion, beautiful packaging, discovering something that actually works, and sometimes buying something for absolutely no deeper reason than because it makes me happy, I’m not interested in pretending I’m above any of that.

What I am interested in is the line between helping someone discover something she loves and quietly teaching her that she has another problem she should solve.

I never want a woman to leave my content newly convinced that she has discovered something wrong with herself, and I think that distinction matters to me much more now than it did when I first started creating.

Beauty has also become almost completely borderless, a woman can sit in New York and absorb Dubai, Beirut, Seoul, Paris and Los Angeles before she has even finished her coffee, which can be incredible, but repetition is powerful too.

You can see the same face, hair, treatment, body or lifestyle so many times that eventually wanting it starts to feel like your own idea, and I catch myself doing it too.

Do I actually want this, or have I simply seen it enough times?

I don’t think the answer is abandoning beauty, I definitely don’t plan to, maybe it is just becoming conscious enough to notice when inspiration quietly starts turning into instruction.

That is part of why I’m building Vanity Files, somewhere beauty can still be fun, aspirational and occasionally ridiculous, but where there is also room to question where our taste comes from, why we want certain things, and whether those desires actually belong to us.

I still want the lip gloss, I just want to know why.