WHEN Dubai businesswoman Negin Fattahi-Dasmal opened the first branch of her luxurious nail salon chain in Iran this year, it was met with both excitement and scepticism among image-conscious young Iranians.
Despite — or perhaps partly because of — strict Islamic dress codes, cosmetics sales in Iran are among the highest in the Middle East.
Women are required to wear modest clothes and headscarves, but their faces and hands are not covered, and many express their individuality with lipstick, mascara and nail polish in styles that would seem elaborate by Western standards.
With most international economic sanctions now lifted after a nuclear agreement with world powers that took effect this year, Ms Fattahi-Dasmal thinks it is time to bring in a high-end international brand.
Her chain of nail salons, N.Bar, already has a customer base among the thousands of well-off young Iranians who holiday in nearby Dubai, where they can sunbathe, shop and dress with relative freedom.
“For Iranian women, it’s a sought-after brand,” Ms Fattahi-Dasmal, an Iranian-born Emirati, said.
“There have been a lot of counterfeit products in Iran. They are extremely hungry for anything that is real, genuine and imported from the West.”
Nonetheless, she said some customers were skeptical that the new Tehran branch could replicate the quality and consistency customers are used to in Dubai, where branches offer dozens of standardised treatments and stringent hygiene procedures.
Iran’s fashion-forward twenty-somethings have kept up with global trends on social media and travels abroad, skirting diplomatic isolation and domestic repression. Ms Fattahi-Dansal says they are discerning consumers.
Even under sanctions, independent shops in the affluent northern districts of Tehran managed to obtain the latest seasonal collections of top global brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Roberto Cavalli.
Some of those luxury fashion brands are now entering Iran directly, and there could be similar opportunities for beauty and cosmetics — a market estimated by Iran’s parliament’s research center to be worth more than $US4billion ($F8b) a year.
