Photo Via Alchemetics Cosmetic
With a passion for makeup and beauty, Reham Fareed always wondered what she could do if she had her own cosmetics brand—the shades she would create, the packaging and so on. Just under a year ago, in November 2018, Fareed turned her dream into a reality, launching Alchemetics Cosmetics, one of the first locally manufactured beauty products lines in Egypt.
“As a little girl, you would always find me hiding behind a curtain with some makeup. [I] always got in trouble for it too! So you can say [it was] pretty early on that I fell in love with makeup,” Fareed begins. Having been a loyal buyer of beauty and skincare products for years, Fareed would soon come to find a gap in the Egyptian beauty market. “I realized there are no artisan Egyptian makeup brands in the market, nothing like the high-end quality makeup we all love but at reasonable prices. And that’s how Alchemetics was born.” At the time, Alchemetics Cosmetics was the only clean, cruelty-free, safe, durable, high-quality Egyptian artisan makeup available in the local market.
The product line includes crème luminizer, lip and cheek tint, Illuminating prepping essence, highlighter drops and velvet pressed eyeshadow, among others. The illuminating prepping essence is water-based, with no added preservatives, which Fareed says can be a blessing as well as a curse. “It keeps the makeup clean but it can also shorten its shelf life to two months, meaning you’ll have to store it in the fridge,” explains Fareed, who says that natural ingredients are always her first choice at Alchemetics.
The current line of products seeks to give a natural glow. “I wanted to cover women in shimmer and sparkles and I wanted to make sure of the sources, where the makeup and ingredients come from,” says Fareed, adding, “Though we love natural concoctions, but above all we love the synthetic fluorphlogopite, which is the magical ingredient that gives all the shimmer and color to our products. We choose and love to use this over its natural equal because it’s much safer for the skin and the environment. We are against the cruel child labor that is used in mining of the natural thing in India.”
When it comes to production, Fareed takes pride in their processes. “Everything we make is handmade from A to Z to ensure quality and safety. We make and sell [them] in small batches.” And other local beauty manufacturers are following suit. “After we started, a couple of other brands started to follow and started to produce makeup too. I think [Egypt] is actually starting to catch up with the world,” Fareed says, adding that her own brand is looking ahead to expansion and a couple of product releases in the coming months in both makeup and skincare.
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