Entrepreneurship

The Creator Who Chose to Sell Less

Mina Alsheikhly built one of the region's largest beauty audiences. Her brand began with something far narrower than her reach, and that choice says more about creator businesses than any follower count.

Ameer Albahouth

14 Oct 2026 • 4 min read

A wide audience, a narrow shelf

Most creator brands begin with a simple calculation. A large audience already trusts a face, so the obvious move is to sell that audience as much as it will accept: a palette, a lipstick range, a fragrance, a skincare line. Reach becomes the business plan, and the product is often whatever the reach can carry.

Mina Alsheikhly's brand started somewhere else. When Forbes Middle East named her among its 30 Women Behind Middle Eastern Brands in 2022, the entry described By Mina Al Sheikhly as a line of four mascaras, produced and packaged in Italy. At the time, the same list recorded more than 3.2 million followers on her personal Instagram account.

Millions of followers. Four mascaras.

That gap is where her story becomes interesting.

A designer who came to beauty from the outside

Alsheikhly is Iraqi and her brand is headquartered in the UAE, according to Forbes Middle East. Her route into beauty did not run through a makeup chair. Her elCinema profile says she studied interior design, and Grazia Middle East describes her earlier work as a fashion photographer. From 2019 she presented Beit Beauty on MBC Iraq, with a second season in 2020.

Each of those roles kept her close to beauty while placing her slightly outside it. An interior designer thinks about how objects are used in a space. A photographer thinks about how a face reads through a lens. A presenter learns what an audience responds to. None of these jobs is the same as making a product, but together they describe someone used to looking at how things work rather than only how they look.

Engineering a small object She founded the brand in 2020. According to the company, as reported by Forbes Middle East in its 2022 list, it had passed $1 million in revenue by November 2021, with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States as its top-selling markets. These are company-reported figures and have not been independently verified.

The products themselves suggest a founder interested in mechanics. Scoop Empire describes her Curved and Elevated kit as a pairing of two mascaras, one to curl the lashes and one to separate them. Product listings at the Iraqi retailer Elryan describe brushes built with bristles of different lengths, short ones to load the formula onto the lashes and longer ones to distribute it.

In March 2026, Alsheikhly posted a behind-the-scenes clip on Snapchat about the dual-mascara product. It showed sketches and prototypes, and her caption described an idea that began years earlier, met many refusals, and went through many rounds of testing and adjustment before reaching the shelf. That account is her own and describes a process, not an outcome. It still says something about how she frames the business: as a product that had to be worked out, not a name that had to be printed on packaging.

A vocabulary of stones

When the brand expanded into colored mascaras, it released four shades: burgundy, brown, green, and blue. Grazia Middle East reported them on sale through Ounass and the brand's own website at AED 79 each. The shades were not given names drawn from the usual makeup lexicon of moods and flirtations. They were named Agate, Tiger Eye, Malachite, and Lapis.

It is a small detail, and it would be a mistake to build a theory on it. But the names belong to the language of materials, the kind of reference that sits more comfortably in a design studio than on a beauty counter. Whatever the intention, they position a mass-market product as something closer to a crafted object.

The test a narrow product creates

There is a practical consequence to starting small. A creator who launches a dozen products can rely on curiosity, loyalty, and novelty to keep sales moving. A creator who launches a mascara is making a different bet. Mascara is a product people use up and replace. The second purchase depends far less on affection for the founder than on whether the first tube worked.

That makes a narrow line unusually revealing. It separates two kinds of demand that creator brands often blur together: people buying because they like the person, and people buying because they like the product. Only the second kind tends to survive when attention moves elsewhere, as it always does online.

The region has seen this pattern before. Scoop Empire notes that Huda Kattan, another Iraqi-heritage creator, began her business in 2013 with a line of false eyelashes before it grew into a global beauty brand. The comparison should not be stretched. The two businesses differ in scale, timing, and structure, and Alsheikhly's brand is younger. But both began with the eyes, and both began with a single category rather than a full catalog.

Saudi Arabia in the middle of the story

Alsheikhly is not a Saudi founder, yet Saudi Arabia appears in her story as one of the brand's top markets, according to the company. Her content travels in Gulf and Iraqi dialects across Instagram and Snapchat, and her products sit on regional platforms such as Ounass and, in Iraq, Elryan.

This is a quieter form of regional growth than the one usually reported. It is not a company announcing expansion into the Kingdom. It is an audience in the Kingdom choosing a product made in Italy, by an Iraqi founder, run from the UAE. For anyone trying to understand how consumer brands now cross borders in the Gulf, that route is worth noticing: the customer often arrives before the company does.

What the follower count cannot tell you

It is easy to measure a creator's growth. Follower numbers rise, views accumulate, and the totals are published for anyone to see. Her own audience has grown well beyond the figure Forbes Middle East recorded in 2022.

The growth of a product is harder to see. It shows up in reorders, in retailers that keep restocking, in customers who have never watched a single one of her videos. None of that is visible from the outside, and the brand has not published recent figures.

Perhaps that is the more interesting measure of her story. The question is not how many people follow Mina Alsheikhly. It is how many people will keep buying her mascara once they stop.

Sources

Note on figures: Revenue and top-market figures are self-reported by the company to Forbes Middle East (November 2021) and have not been independently verified by Arabian Growth.