Seven rituals older than any brand — and the women I learned them from
The beauty industry is worth half a trillion dollars. It employs more scientists, marketers, and packaging designers than most countries employ in their entire manufacturing sector. It publishes research, sponsors dermatologists, files patents. It is, by any measure, a serious and sophisticated enterprise.
And yet the most effective things I have ever done for my skin, my hair, my nervous system, and my sleep — I learned from women who have never heard of it. Women in kitchens and courtyards and hammams across the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, and the Levant. Women who learned from their mothers, who learned from theirs, in an unbroken chain of practical knowledge that stretches back further than any brand's founding story. Women who do not call what they do beauty. They call it care. They call it preparation. They call it, simply, what you do.
Over twenty years of travelling inside these cultures — not as a tourist, but as someone who stayed long enough to be invited into the ordinary parts — I have been taught seven rituals that I have never been able to improve upon. This is not nostalgia. This is not romanticisation. This is testimony.
"The most effective things I have ever done for my skin, my hair, my nervous system — I learned from women who have never heard of the beauty industry."
The Damask roses water
I first encountered it in a house in Shiraz, in a kitchen that smelled of something I could not name. The woman of the house — in her sixties, with the unlined skin of someone who has never worried about unlined skin — was at the stove before sunrise. Not cooking. She was distilling.
She had been doing this every spring for forty years, she told me. The Damask roses came from a specific garden. The water came from a specific well. The copper pot had been her mother's. The process took the whole morning and produced a bottle of rosewater so concentrated that a single splash of it on the face stopped you breathing for a moment — not from shock, but from something closer to recognition. As if the skin had been waiting for it.
She used it every morning and every evening. Not as a toner — she did not know that word. As a greeting. As the first thing and the last thing. She had been doing it since she was twelve years old and she looked, at sixty-three, like someone who had discovered a profound secret about time.
The science, which arrived centuries after the practice, explains the mechanism: Rosa damascena contains phenylethanol, geraniol, and citronellol — anti-inflammatory compounds that regulate cortisol at the skin barrier, reduce oxidative stress, and signal the nervous system toward calm. The women of Shiraz knew none of this. They only knew that it worked. That it had always worked. That it would continue to work long after anyone had bothered to explain why.
What she used: Fresh-distilled Damask rose hydrosol, spring water, copper vessel, morning light, and forty years of practice.
Frankincense
In Oman, frankincense is not a spa ingredient. It is a daily material. The bukhoor — the incense burner — sits in the corner of every room that matters. It is lit in the evening, after the day's work is done and before the night's rest begins. The smoke is not ambient. You walk through it deliberately. You stand inside it. You hold your clothing in it. Your skin absorbs what your clothing absorbs.
I learned this from a woman in Muscat who found it mildly amusing that I was writing anything down. This is just what you do, she kept saying. You don't write down how to breathe.
What the frankincense resin — Boswellia sacra, the finest grade of which grows only in the Dhofar region of southern Oman — does to the body is now a matter of serious pharmacological interest. Boswellic acids are among the most potent natural anti-inflammatory compounds known. Inhaled, they cross the blood-brain barrier and produce measurable reductions in cortisol. On the skin, the smoke deposits a resin that has been shown to accelerate cell regeneration and reduce the appearance of scarring. The Omani women's unwritten prescription — stand in the smoke every evening — turns out to be an exquisitely calibrated protocol for skin health, respiratory calm, and neurological downregulation. In that order.
They have been doing it for three thousand years.
What she used: Raw Boswellia sacra resin from Dhofar, a clay bukhoor, slow-burning charcoal, and the knowledge that evenings are for returning to yourself.
The benefits of Hammam
A note on what I mean by ancient: I do not mean old-fashioned. I mean tested by a longer trial period than any clinical study has ever run, on a more diverse range of subjects, under conditions that more closely resemble actual life. An ingredient used continuously for three thousand years has passed a test that five years of peer-reviewed research cannot replicate.
The first time I went to a real hammam — not the spa version, but the neighbourhood hammam in a Marrakech medina where women go on Tuesday and Friday mornings — I did not understand what was happening to my skin. I came out feeling not clean but different. As if something had been removed that I had forgotten was there.
The woman who scrubbed me had hands like sandpaper made of intention. She used savon beldi — a black soap made from olives, water, and potash — and a kessa glove, and she worked with the systematic thoroughness of someone performing a necessary act rather than providing a service. There was no conversation. There was no music. There was only the steam and the work.
Savon beldi is not soap in the way that word is usually understood. It contains no hardeners, no preservatives, no fragrance beyond the olive oil itself. It is, at its simplest, saponified olive oil — the same substance that Moroccan women have been using on their skin for centuries. But the ritual around it is inseparable from the ingredient. The heat opens. The beldi penetrates. The kessa removes. The cold water closes. The sequence is not optional. You cannot replicate it with a product alone.
I go back to a hammam wherever I find one. I have yet to find a single exfoliation product that produces what those hands in that steam produced in forty minutes on a Tuesday morning in Marrakech.
What she used: Olive-oil black soap, aged minimum six months. A rough kessa glove. Steam at the right temperature. And forty years of knowing exactly how hard to press.
The benefits of ubatan
There is a ritual in Rajasthan that happens before a wedding, before a journey, and sometimes on an ordinary Tuesday when a woman decides her skin needs attending to. It is called ubtan, and it predates every skincare brand by several thousand years.
I was taught to make it in a kitchen in Jodhpur by a woman who measured by handful rather than by gram. Turmeric — haldi, the foundation of everything, the ingredient that colours the skin golden and drives out anything that does not belong there. Chickpea flour to bind and to gently abrade. Raw milk for its lactic acids. Rose oil for the smell, which she said was not optional. Saffron on special occasions, which this, she said, was.
She applied it to my face and arms and left it to dry in the afternoon sun. When she removed it, my skin was warm and faintly gold and felt like something I did not have a word for. She used the Rajasthani word, which translates approximately as ready.
Curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, has been the subject of over ten thousand published studies in the last twenty years. Its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antimicrobial properties are among the most comprehensively documented of any natural compound. Every one of those studies is arriving, by a long route, at the conclusion that the women of Rajasthan reached empirically, centuries ago, in kitchens where no one was taking notes.
What she used: Wild turmeric, chickpea flour, raw whole milk, rose oil, and saffron. And the conviction that you should prepare yourself before anything important — including an ordinary afternoon.
Turmeric
"Every study on turmeric is arriving, by a long route, at the conclusion that the women of Rajasthan reached empirically, centuries ago, in kitchens where no one was taking notes."
This is the ritual I am most reluctant to explain, because the explanation makes it sound less beautiful than it is. Bear with me.
In the steppes of Central Asia, women have been using fermented mare's milk — kumis — on their hair for as long as there have been horses on the steppe, which is to say, a very long time. I encountered it first in a yurt in the Kazakh grasslands and then again, refracted through the urban version, in a family home in Tashkent, where the grandmother still prepared it and the granddaughter had converted a corner of the bathroom to storing it.
Applied to the hair and scalp before washing — left for thirty minutes under a cloth wrap, in the warmth — it does something to the texture that I can only describe as structural. The proteins in the fermented milk coat each strand. The lactic acids dissolve the mineral buildup that modern shampoos cannot touch. The result is hair that moves as if it has been unencumbered of something it was carrying without knowing it.
The grandmother in Tashkent had hair past her waist, thick and black with almost no grey, at seventy-one. She attributed this entirely to kumis and to not worrying. I believe her on both counts.
What she used: Fermented mare's milk, aged three days. A cloth wrap. Thirty minutes of patience. And, she insisted, the absence of worry — which she considered an ingredient as real as any other.
The Olive oil
In the Levant, olive oil is not a cooking ingredient that occasionally crosses over into beauty. It is the fundamental substance, the base material from which everything else is understood. The olive tree is, in this part of the world, the most profound object in the landscape — some trees still producing fruit are over a thousand years old, their trunks wider than two people embracing.
A woman in a village near Sidon in Lebanon showed me what she did every night before sleep. She warmed a small clay bowl of oil over a candle — not to heat it dramatically, just to bring it to the temperature of the body. She pressed it into her face with the flat of her hands, moving slowly from the centre outward, in a sequence she had been taught by her mother and her mother's mother and, she said, as far back as anyone could remember.
There is a word in Arabic — dahn — that encompasses anointing, oiling, and preparing. It is used for religious ritual and for skincare without distinction. The boundary between the sacred and the practical, in this tradition, does not exist. The oil prepares the body for sleep the way a prayer prepares the spirit. They are the same action.
I use cold-pressed Lebanese olive oil on my face most nights. I have spent more money than I care to admit on alternatives. None of them have improved upon it.
What she used: Single-estate cold-pressed olive oil, a clay warming bowl, a candle, and the understanding that preparing for sleep is as significant as anything you do while awake.
Sidr — the leaves of the lote tree, Ziziphus spina-christi
This last ritual I include with particular care, because the culture that holds it has been, in recent years, the subject of so much darkness that the ordinary beauty of its daily life has been almost entirely obscured. Let me return, briefly, to the ordinary beauty.
Sidr — the leaves of the lote tree, Ziziphus spina-christi — has been used for hair washing in Yemen for over two thousand years. The leaves are dried and ground into a fine powder. Mixed with water, they produce a substance that foams gently and smells like something between hay and honey and something else that has no English name. Applied to the hair and scalp, worked in slowly, left to sit, and rinsed with warm water, it cleans without stripping, conditions without coating, and leaves the hair with a weight and a shine that no synthetic formulation I have encountered has been able to replicate.
The Yemeni women I know who still use it — most of them now in the diaspora, in Dubai and London and Singapore — carry the powder with them when they travel. They do not trust what they can buy instead. Having tried what they carry, I understand completely.
The sidr is mentioned in both the Quran and in pre-Islamic poetry. It is one of the oldest continuously documented cosmetic ingredients in the world. The tree is sacred. The leaves are practical. In Yemen, as in the best of these traditions, the sacred and the practical have always been the same thing.
What she used: Dried Ziziphus spina-christi leaves, ground to fine powder. Warm water. The knowledge that this was what her grandmother used, and her grandmother before that, and that there is a specific kind of trust that only unbroken practice can earn.
I am aware that what I am describing sounds, to a certain kind of reader, like nostalgia. Like the romanticisation of the pre-modern. Like the projection of wisdom onto women who simply had no alternatives.
I want to be precise in my disagreement. These women had alternatives. Persian physicians had access to trade routes that carried every exotic ingredient in the known world. Moroccan hammam culture coexisted with sophisticated urban medicine. The women of Rajasthan made conscious choices about what they used on their bodies, and they made those choices across many generations of continuous experiment. What they produced was not a lack of options. It was the result of the longest running clinical trial in human history: lived experience, tested daily, refined across generations, and transmitted by women who had no incentive to recommend something that did not work.
The beauty industry was invented in the 20th century. These women invented beauty long before the industry arrived to package it.
"What they produced was not a lack of options. It was the result of the longest running clinical trial in human history: lived experience, tested daily, refined across generations."
What I am building with Timeless Beauty and the Old beauty recipes from around the world book is an attempt to document, honour, and make usable the knowledge I have been privileged to receive. Not to appropriate it. Not to rebrand it. Not to strip it of its roots and press it into a serum with a scientific-sounding name. But to say clearly: this came from somewhere specific. It was made by someone specific. It has been travelling toward you for a very long time.
The women in this piece did not ask to be thanked. They did not think they were doing anything remarkable. They were, as the woman in Muscat told me, just doing what you do.
I have been trying, for twenty years, to understand what they meant by that. This is a part of what I have found so far.
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