By Fatima Khan
I got dengue fever the summer I turned 20, and in a strange way, that’s the reason Aura exists.
It was 2010, and dengue had seized Lahore like never before. Once I was diagnosed, my doctor told me I would need to apply mosquito repellent every day during dengue season for the rest of my life to reduce the risk of getting infected again. “But what about protection from toxins?” my mother exclaimed. That’s when my father, Anees Ahmad Khan, instead of simply buying a commercial repellent off the shelf, decided to make one himself. From scratch. Au naturel. Without a single toxic ingredient in it.
If you knew my father, this wouldn’t surprise you at all. He had a pharmaceutical background, but he was a handyman at heart and the most resourceful individual I have ever known. He could build a computer and edit a film single-handedly, simply because he enjoyed knowing how every part of a thing worked. So when he decided my mosquito repellent needed to be 100% natural, it wasn’t a grand declaration. It was just Baba doing what Baba did: disappearing into a problem until he’d figured it out.
Once my father had a taste for formulating things with his own hands, he didn’t stop. He moved on to shampoos. Then soaps. He even built his own soap cutter, which we still use at Aura today. My mother, Saweela, was right there with him through all of it. She used her Ayurvedic knowledge and desi totkas to suggest the most effective ingredients. She has always been fiercely particular about what goes into our food and onto our skin, and between the two of them, this hobby found a natural home in our house.
I remember coming back from university one summer and walking into our kitchen to find it completely transformed. It was less kitchen and more laboratory: bowls, oils, scales, beakers, notebooks with formulations scribbled all over them. And it smelled incredible. That’s when I discovered my love for essential oils and their endless properties.
We started handing out the shampoos and soaps to family and friends, half as gifts and half as an unofficial trial run. They didn’t just like them. They asked for more. So, as a family, we made the leap to formulate and sell a proper range of natural skincare products on Facebook. My father designed the logo himself, too. Of course he did.
The response caught all of us off guard. Within a short span of time, my mother had reached out to retailers across Pakistan and secured stockists for what would become one of the country’s early luxury natural skincare lines. Aura wasn’t built on a business plan. It was built on a family’s instinct, curiosity and a very particular refusal to compromise on what we were willing to put on our own skin. Somehow, it worked.
I was there for the recipe formulation and the design conversations from the very start, and while I loved it, I had my own plan that didn’t involve skincare. I studied film and was determined to build a career behind the camera. Then, in 2013, I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and the unpredictable hours of film production became genuinely difficult to manage alongside my health. It was hard to accept at the time. Looking back now, I think of it as one of those moments that was both unfortunate and fortunate, because it brought me to Aura full-time.
It has been a deeply wholesome journey from there, watching something that started as a homegrown family hobby grow into a brand with a real footprint.
What I’m most proud of is what Aura has stood for since the beginning: honest products.
That sounds simple, but the more time I’ve spent in this industry, the more I’ve realized how important it is. We are remarkably trusting when it comes to what we put on our skin. A pretty bottle, an attractive ingredient, a celebrity endorsement or a promise of “glowing” skin can be enough to make us reach for a product without asking very basic questions: what exactly is in this? Why is it there? Is there any research behind the claim? Is it appropriate for my skin? What happens if I use it for months or years?
We often read the front of a skincare bottle more carefully than the back. We are drawn to words like natural, brightening, detoxifying, anti-ageing and herbal, even though a label alone doesn’t tell us whether a product is well formulated or whether its claims have any meaningful evidence behind them. “Natural” isn’t automatically synonymous with safe, just as something being synthetic doesn’t automatically make it harmful. For us, the important question has always been more fundamental: do we understand what we’re using, why we’re using it, and what it is intended to do?
That mindset came directly from my parents. They were never interested in putting something on their skin simply because everyone else was using it. They wanted to know what was inside it.
At Aura, we use high-quality natural ingredients, drawing on Ayurvedic knowledge and research, and formulate with long-term skin and hair health in mind rather than the promise of a quick fix. We were also among the first brands in Pakistan to publicly push back against the obsession with skin whitening and to list every ingredient on our packaging, at a time when that level of transparency wasn’t the norm. We were also the first all-natural skincare brand in the country to manufacture entirely in-house.
You know you’re doing something right when cancer patients choose to use your products at a time when their skin is particularly sensitive. For me, those moments mean more than any marketing campaign ever could.
None of this has come easily. Getting people to trust a local, natural brand over an international one, especially back in 2012, was an uphill climb, and honestly, it still is in many ways. Retail is not an easy space for a woman to navigate; it remains heavily male-dominated and often operates through systems that don’t particularly support the local economy.
Trend-driven skincare also tends to outperform research-driven skincare in this market, which can be difficult to compete with when your entire ethos is built around Ayurveda, formulation and consistency rather than the latest fad. Consumers understandably want results, but the industry can sometimes encourage us to chase those results without asking enough questions about what we’re actually buying.
We also grew organically, by choice. I’ve since realized that this came at a cost. We helped open a door for the local skincare market, and many others came through that door and eventually outpaced us on marketing. I’m slowly learning to catch up.
Underlying all of this is a simpler, more structural problem: Pakistan still doesn’t have all the supporting industries a brand like ours needs. Reliable raw material suppliers and high-quality packaging manufacturers, for example, can be difficult to find. We’ve often had to build around gaps that brands in other markets don’t have to think about.
And then there was the biggest gap of all. We lost my father, rather suddenly, in 2018.
He was Aura’s backbone in every sense, but he was also the person who taught me how to think about problems. Baba wasn’t the kind of mentor who sat you down and gave you a lecture about business. He taught by doing. He was endlessly curious, practical and wonderfully hands-on. If something didn’t work, he wanted to understand why. If something could be made better, he wanted to figure out how. He didn’t seem particularly interested in whether something was difficult. He was interested in whether it could be done.
That way of thinking has stayed with me, so has the memory of our kitchen: the bowls and beakers, the oils lined up on the counter, the notebooks full of formulations, and my father working away at something simply because he wanted to understand it. I miss him terribly at times.
Losing him could have been the end of Aura’s story. Instead, my mother, my best friend (and business partner) Mahasin, and I made the decision to keep going. We decided to keep making products we could stand behind, in the way Baba had taught us: by understanding what goes into them, questioning what doesn’t make sense, and never taking the easy answer simply because it is the one sitting on the shelf.
Aura is now part of a much bigger and more crowded beauty industry than the one we entered in 2012. There are more brands, more products, more claims and more choices than ever. But sometimes I think about that kitchen and realize that, in many ways, nothing has changed.
For me, the real legacy of Aura isn’t that we were early, or that we survived, or even that we helped build a natural skincare category in Pakistan, it is that my father taught me never to stop asking the important questions…and as long as Aura exists, I hope we never do.
The author is a Founding Partner at Aura. When she’s not busy running a skincare business, she’s either watching way too many crime documentaries, hanging out with her dogs or bathroom singing.