“I was eleven. I took my grandmother’s tin.”

Aaliyah left Iran as a child with one bag. Fifteen years later she runs a seven-figure halal skincare brand built on the recipe she carried out with her. We sat down with her for an hour. This is most of it.

She is not an easy interview, in the sense that she answers the question you asked rather than the one she would prefer. Twice she stopped to correct something she thought sounded grander than it was.

Start with the tin. What was it?

Rendered fat, a little honey, whatever oil there was that month. My grandmother made it. Everyone’s grandmother made it. You did not buy something like that in a shop — partly because for long stretches there was no shop, and partly because why would you.

What did you use it for?

Everything. Chapped hands in winter. A burn. A baby’s cheeks. My aunt had cracked heels from standing all day and she used it on those. It was not skincare. It was just what was in the bathroom.

You were eleven when your family left Iran. What do you actually remember?

Less than people want me to. It was not one dramatic night. It was a slow narrowing. School stopped being every day, and then it stopped. The adults started using the word temporary about things that were obviously not temporary.

What I remember properly is my mother putting an empty bag on the bed and telling me to choose. And going into the bathroom at the last minute and taking the tin off the shelf.

Why the tin?

I could not tell you. I was a child. I think I understood, in the way children understand things without having the words, that we were not coming back, and I wanted something from the house that still smelled like the house.

Aaliyah holding an old salve tin — “It was not skincare. It was just what was in the bathroom.”

“A lot of people helped us who did not have to. That is the part I remember most. Not the bad part. The people.”

When did your skin become a problem?

Within about six months of arriving. Different water, different climate, and a house that was dry as a bone. My hands cracked open and my face went raw along the jaw and the hairline, right where the scarf sits. I was fifteen, sixteen by the time it was properly bad.

Which is a bad age for that.

It is a spectacularly bad age to have a face you do not want to look at.

So you went to the chemist.

Like everybody does. And this is the part every Muslim woman I meet already knows before I finish the sentence. My English was still coming. The ingredient lists were four hundred words and half of it was chemistry. I was looking for one thing — whether there was alcohol in it — because I pray five times a day and make wudu before each one, and I was not confident enough in my own knowledge to guess.

Did you ask anyone?

I asked a pharmacist once. She was not rude to me at all. She just did not know, and she looked at me like it was a strange thing to ask. I remember standing there thinking — there are so many of us. How is this a strange question?

What did you buy in the end?

Whatever was in front of me, because I was sixteen and my face was peeling. Most of it stung. The ones that did not sting sat on top of my skin like a film, and a film is its own problem, because five times a day I was washing it off. Cream on at eight, washed off three times before Isha. It was never on my skin long enough to do anything.

Aaliyah reading a label in a pharmacy aisle — “Nobody in that aisle was designing for me. It was not malice. I just was not who they had in mind.”

When did the tin run out?

Years later. I had rationed it, a fingernail at a time, for the bad days. One evening I scraped the corners and there was nothing left. I cried about it in a way that was obviously not about the salve.

Was there a recipe?

No. There never is. And she was not there to ask.

So you tried to make it.

Badly, at first. For a long time. I want to be careful here because the short version of this story makes it sound like a plan. It was not a plan. I was not building a brand, I had no interest in building a brand. I came from a family that had lost everything once and was not keen to gamble what it had rebuilt.

What made it work eventually?

Understanding that the fat matters enormously. Tallow’s fatty acid profile is close enough to your own sebum that skin absorbs it into the structure that is already there instead of wearing it on top. Which, if you are about to wash your face again in two hours, is the entire thing.

And the hold-up?

Sourcing. I could not find halal certified tallow. Not from anyone who would tell me how the animal was slaughtered or what solvents were used in the rendering. Everything available was industrial rendered fat of undisclosed origin. I was not putting that on my own face before Fajr and I was certainly not selling it to somebody who trusted me. That took two years to solve and it is still the most expensive decision in the business.

“Halal is the floor. Tayyib is the standard. I did not want to build a brand whose whole promise was ‘this will not invalidate your prayer.’ That is the least you can do.”

Why that name?

In the Qur’an the two words travel together — halalan tayyiban. Lawful and good. Permitted and pure. I wanted the second one. I wanted it to be genuinely good, the best thing on the shelf, that happens to also be yours.

The business has done seven figures. How does that sit with you?

Uncomfortably, if I am honest. Not out of modesty. It is that a number like that, said out loud, makes it sound like a strategy that worked. It was a woman trying to replace something she had lost, for about a decade, mostly badly.

What do you say to someone who thinks beef fat on her face is strange?

That it sounds alarming for about ninety seconds and then it stops. It is one of the oldest skin preparations there is. That is exactly why every grandmother from Anatolia to the Levant was making a version of the same tin.

What do you want a woman reading this to take away?

That the years she spent turning boxes over and putting them back were not her being difficult or fussy. Nobody had bothered to make it for her yet. That is all that was happening.