Every fragrance house has an origin myth. Kayali's is unusual because it is verifiable: a Dubai-based Iraqi-American businesswoman who grew up on bakhoor and layered attars decided the global perfume industry had been borrowing from her culture for decades without ever letting that culture own the shelf. Seven years on, the brand she built is stocked beside the French houses it once had to explain itself to.
Before the brand: Huda Beauty and the Kattan sisters
Mona Kattan was already a heavyweight before a single bottle existed. With her sisters Huda and Alya, she co-founded Huda Beauty in 2013 and helped build it from a Dubai makeup blog into one of the most valuable beauty companies to ever come out of the region. Within that empire, Mona was the fragrance obsessive — the sister with hundreds of bottles, known for scenting hotel rooms before she slept in them. When the sisters looked for the next category, perfume was less a business decision than an inevitability.
An Iraqi-American childhood, scented
The Kattan family's roots are Iraqi, and Mona Kattan has always been specific about what that meant for her nose: a household where bakhoor smoke was hospitality, where oud was worn rather than displayed, and where fragrance was layered — oil, smoke, spray — rather than sprayed once and forgotten. She grew up between the United States and the Gulf, absorbing both the Western perfume counter and the Khaleeji ritual. Kayali is, quite literally, that dual fluency bottled. The name means "my imagination" in Arabic, and she has described the brand as the perfume wardrobe she wished existed as a teenager.
2018: launching Kayali from Dubai
Kayali launched in 2018 under the Huda Beauty umbrella, headquartered in Dubai — a deliberate statement at a time when "prestige fragrance" still defaulted to Paris and Grasse. The debut lineup was built around a then-radical premise for a mainstream retailer: numbered bottles designed to be layered, echoing how Gulf wearers already combined scents. Vanilla | 28 became the breakout, a jasmine-wrapped vanilla that now anchors an entire vanilla collection, while Musk | 12 quietly became the layering base of the range.
Putting Gulf ritual on a Sephora shelf
The brand's most culturally significant move came later: the Oudgasm line, which paired oud eau de parfums with real bakhoor chips and burners sold through mainstream Western retail. It is worth pausing on how unusual that is. Bakhoor had never been merchandised at Sephora before; mona kattan put a mabkhara ritual in front of shoppers in Los Angeles and London with the same confidence the industry had always reserved for French lavender fields. For Gulf customers, the effect was different but equally pointed — seeing our ritual treated as prestige rather than exotica, by someone who actually practises it.
Independence and what comes next
In 2023, Kayali was spun off from Huda Beauty as an independent company, with Mona Kattan as its global CEO and co-owner alongside an investment partner — a rare case of a Gulf-founded beauty brand graduating to standalone status on its own numbers. The catalogue has since grown past thirty fragrances, from gourmands like Yum Boujee Marshmallow | 81 to clean skin scents, while keeping layering as the organizing idea. The bottles still carry numbers, an open invitation to combine them.
Why the story matters
Plenty of celebrity brands sell a face; very few sell a heritage the founder actually lives. Kayali's success proved that a Dubai-headquartered house, run by an Arab woman, could compete globally without diluting where it came from. If you want to understand the brand, start with Kayali's official range and try one scent over another the way its founder intended — layered, generous, and unmistakably of this region.