Your Relationship With Beauty Ft. Zainab Rashid

I sit down with Zainab Rashid, the founder of Zay Beauty, and the conversation wanders into so many corners of what it means to really see yourself. Zay Beauty was one of the first Pakistani beauty brands I ever fell for, and I still remember the moment I spotted a highlighter with a name so deeply Desi that I just stared at it. But behind the Jhilmils and the taddas is a woman who built this brand while keeping a full time corporate job, raising two young children, and quietly untangling decades of being told she was not quite beautiful enough. This is not only a conversation about makeup. It is about worth, real skin, the filters we hide behind, and the quiet power of not quitting the day job.

Growing up between two worlds

Zainab was born in Dubai but moved to a small city near Islamabad after grade three. Her father stayed back for work, and she, her mother, and her siblings made Pakistan home. She went to university there, in a new department that didn’t even feel like her first choice. She admits she was stubborn, angry about the move, but now she sees those years as the making of her. The friends, the drama, the discomfort, it all added up. When she finally moved back to Dubai after graduation, the shift was jarring. She went from a town where everything was ten minutes away to a sprawling city where a grocery run took forty five minutes. And she felt deeply lonely. No friends, no car, just a metro ride and the weight of starting over.

A brand born from feeling worthless

A few years into her corporate job, something shifted. She was working in a government free zone organization, handling big projects, but she felt like nothing she did was good enough. “I was feeling quite worthless,” she tells me. She didn’t know it then, but she was going through depression. There were days she couldn’t leave her bed. One evening, in a throwaway statement to her husband, she said, “I’m gonna start a makeup brand.” He said yes. That sentence set off a long, slow process of researching suppliers, dreaming up an eyeshadow palette, and finding her way back to herself. “It was coming out of that feeling that I was having. I felt like I was in control,” she says. Makeup had always been a creative outlet for her, never about looking beautiful but about playing with color and dimension. Zay Beauty gave her that control back.

A Desi brand that saw a gap

She wanted to sell in Pakistan because the gap was so obvious. At the time, people relied on fake copies of international makeup, products that could burn your skin or infect your eyes, while original brands were too expensive and often unavailable. Her vision was simple: high quality, affordable, accessible. But she also insisted on a strong Desi identity. From shade names rooted in Pakistani culture to palettes designed for local skin tones, she made a brand that unapologetically represented where she came from. “I loved Pakistani culture, fashion, everything, and I felt it was not being represented in the beauty industry,” she says. That distinctiveness was what first drew me to Zay Beauty, and it is what made the brand stand out in a sea of sameness.

The stubbornness behind every product

That attention to detail did not come easy. When she wanted to create a dual sided eyeliner, one side a pen and the other a liquid, suppliers told her the custom packaging would require a minimum order of 30,000 units. That was an impossible investment. She searched for years until a supplier in Taiwan offered a compromise: 12,000 tubes, with only 6,000 filled at first. She took it. She fights with her long time supplier over a few hundred pieces to lower costs. Every product is a small testament to that quiet, practical stubbornness.

Learning to see beauty everywhere

Growing up, Zainab was told she was chubby and dark, and that these were bad things. Aunties suggested skin lightening creams, classmates acted superior. She believed she was not beautiful. “I grew up believing that okay yeah,” she says with a soft acceptance. It took moving to Dubai, where strangers began to compliment her, for that conditioning to crack. Now she genuinely finds everyone beautiful. She has sat with the damage of those early messages and actively pushes back. On her own Instagram, she shows real skin, unfiltered, pores visible, no blurring. “I am a very normal individual. I own a beauty brand. I don’t want to look like that fake beautiful.” The beauty industry can be toxic, she notes, full of filters and inauthentic portrayals. She wants to be part of the change, normalizing what skin actually looks like, with or without makeup.

The case for not quitting your day job

People often ask her why she hasn’t left her corporate role. She has been there twelve years, growing from customer service to business development and product management. Her answer is rooted in responsibility. She didn’t come from generational wealth. She didn’t want to burden her husband or build a business on borrowed dreams. She also saw how unstable the environment in Pakistan could be, with inflation, currency fluctuations, taxes, and crises that hit right when the brand needed stability. “I’m so happy I didn’t do that because it then crashed,” she says of the time she might have left. Her salary gives her the safety to run Zay Beauty without fear, and the skills she gained, writing emails, managing difficult people, presenting confidently, inform everything she does with her own brand. She recommends a corporate stint to anyone starting out, because those soft skills are a lifetime asset.

Redefining what motherhood and work look like together

With two young kids, a full time job, and a side business, Zainab has learned to drop the superwoman ideal. She has a nanny she calls a godsend, a husband who drops the kids at school, and a strict morning workout routine that doesn’t eat into evening family time. But the real shift was mental. “You don’t take the pressure of having it together all the time,” she says. She believes women need to detach shame from their roles. If the house is a mess while work thrives, so be it. If the priority is her son and her content suffers, that is okay. There is no perfect balance, only a constant, guilt free shifting of what matters most in each moment.

A cross border love story

Zainab is married to an Indian man from Goa, and she tells me with a laugh, “I highly recommend if you find someone.” Their families initially opposed the match, but they waited. What drew her was his calm, his lack of control, the way he supported her independence without question. She sees in him a different kind of masculine energy, one that feels like an equal partnership. The cultural differences are there, but they show up in small ways, like the simplicity of his family’s weddings and their easy, laid back way of living. Being with him, she says, helped her grow into a less angry, more at ease version of herself.

Why this conversation stays with me

At the heart of this talk is the idea that you can reclaim your worth through something you build with your own hands. Zainab didn’t wait until she felt ready. She started messy, kept her safety net, and let a small spark of curiosity pull her out of a very dark place. She is also proof that a beauty brand can stand for real skin and against the pressure to look flawless. There is so much here for anyone who has ever felt not enough, not fair enough, not thin enough, or not passionate enough to justify the life they are living. As Zainab says, you don’t need a grand passion. You just need to start, and let yourself be exactly where you are.