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Beauty & Wellness

Malena Higuera


The Cuban beauty executive is bringing a more personal approach to fragrance at Noyz


Malena Higuera is building a new kind of beauty brand, one community at a time© Courtesy
OCTOBER 21, 2026 1:24 PM EDT

At Stagecoach, the major country music festival held in Indio, California, Malena Higuera brought Noyz’s newest fragrance straight to Ella Langley’s fans. On April 24, 2026, Noyz stocked a local Ulta Beauty store with several hundred bottles of Be Her and installed a life-size version that festivalgoers could spray. For Higuera, the setting made sense: thousands of country music fans were already gathering in the Southern California desert, giving Noyz an opportunity to introduce Langley’s fragrance directly to the audience that knew her music.

The fragrance began with Langley and one of her lyrics: “I just wanna be her so bad, it hurts so bad.” The country singer and Robertet perfumer Jérôme Epinette worked through ten iterations before arriving at the warm floral, which moves from violet, peony and bergamot into tobacco accord, cashmere woods and salted amber.

Under Higuera’s leadership, Be Her was conceived as a collaboration rather than a traditional celebrity endorsement, bringing together Langley’s audience and the community Noyz had already been cultivating.

That approach draws on a career spent learning how consumers connect with beauty brands. By 2020, Higuera had spent 14 years across four roles at L’Oréal, including leadership at Dermablend. During that chapter, she described herself as an “intrapreneur,” someone interested in creating change from within a major company.

Malena Higuera is building a new kind of beauty brand, one community at a time© Courtesy

She later became General Manager of Urban Decay in the United States, where the brand’s social engagement value reached $173 million and grew 49%. In August 2024, Beach House Group appointed her CEO of Noyz, giving the longtime beauty executive a smaller, faster platform to put her ideas into practice.

The results quickly followed. In 2025, Noyz added 235,000 followers across its social channels, while Higuera earned a place on the Glossy 50. More than 1,300 people attended a New York pop-up for Only Human, and related prompts generated 90,000 responses through the Noyz website and Snapchat. The numbers reflected an approach centered on participation: consumers weren’t simply being marketed to; they were being invited into the brand.

Higuera’s Cuban identity has also been part of how she has spoken about her place in the beauty industry. In 2022, during a L’Oréal Hispanic Heritage Month event, she described herself as “authentically Cuban.”

In 2026, Be Her brings several threads of Higuera’s career together: years of experience inside some of beauty’s biggest companies, the agility of an emerging fragrance label, and a belief that growth starts with understanding the people on the other side of the product.

After years of helping shape established beauty brands, Higuera is now defining what one can look like under her own leadership.