Siham Cyrine never thought she’d end up here. Not in Dubai, not in fragrance, and certainly not leading one of the buzziest new perfume brands to come out of the region. But life, as she puts it, has a way of forcing you exactly where you’re meant to be—whether you’re ready or not.
Growing up in a traditional Lebanese immigrant family from California, expectations were clear: pick a stable career, preferably one that involved a degree, a title, and a steady paycheck. Law seemed like a respectable choice, so she pursued it. She was ambitious, academically sharp, and diligent. But while everyone around her in university had a fire in their eyes for their chosen paths—internships, MCAT prep, grad school plans—she felt like she was simply going through the motions. “I was jealous of people who had a passion,” she admits to MILLE. “I kept asking myself, what do I even like? I thought if I just kept repeating to myself that I wanted to be a lawyer, maybe it would feel real.”
It never did.
After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2017, she found herself stuck in an endless loop of bad job experiences, rejections, and closed doors. “It felt like everything was falling into place for everyone but me,” she says. She worked for law firms, trying to convince herself this was her path, but nothing stuck. Every opportunity either ended in disappointment or a door slamming in her face. And then came 2020—when the world hit pause. COVID-19 forced everyone to reevaluate their lives, and for Cyrine, it was a moment of reckoning. With no stable income and her government assistance mysteriously blocked, she did what she had to do: she found work where money was moving.
“I started working in underground clubs in LA during COVID,” she says. “And I was surrounded by people my age making crazy money. At first, I was like, what am I doing wrong? But then my perspective shifted—I thought, why couldn’t that be me too?”
That mentality shift was everything. She saw people, her own age, hustling, flexing, throwing more money than she’d ever seen. “I was making money I’d never touched before in my life,” she says. “And suddenly, I understood that success didn’t just belong to the people with degrees and corporate jobs. It belonged to the people who went out and took it.” It was then that she realized she didn’t need permission to go after what she wanted, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that was yet. Spoiler alert: It happened to be Dubai.
It wasn’t planned, not really. When the LA club she worked at shut down suddenly and the owners made off without paying her, she made a split-second decision: she’d take her bottle service skills to the UAE, stack cash, and figure out her next move from there.
Dubai, she thought, would be a temporary stop. A place to make quick money before she finally started something for herself. And for a moment, it seemed like the right choice. In just one month, she made nearly $24,000 in tips. “I thought, I’m just going to make all this money and then decide what I’m going to do with it, whether it’s start a business or be an entrepreneur or whatever. I just knew I had something in me, I just needed to get the money. This was going to be my last hurrah at the club,” she recalls.
But then, reality hit. After quitting, the club she worked for refused to pay out her earnings. “They kept making excuses. We kept going back and forth.” Eventually, she got to the head of HR. “I’ll never forget this phone call,” Cyrine says. “She laughed in my face.” (It’s okay, Cyrine would get the last laugh.)
At this point, she had nothing. No savings, no income, no backup plan. Her card was declining for McDonald’s fries. “So now, it’s two clubs in a row that refused to pay me,” she says incredulously.
She was spiraling. “I went from working at the club to just being at the club all the time.” It was one of the lowest points of her life. And then, in a moment of pure frustration, she did something different—she picked up her phone and started talking. “I was pissed off,” she says. “So I just started doing my makeup and talking shit on TikTok.”
The internet listened. “I didn’t think anything of it at first,” she recalls. “I was just venting. But people connected to it. For the first time I wasn’t trying to force anything.” Brand deals started rolling in. Fashion Nova, SheGlam, different skincare brands—suddenly, the money she had fought so hard for was landing in her lap.
But selling someone else’s products wasn’t enough. If people believed in her taste, why not create something of her own? “I knew I loved smells. I was so picky about perfumes. People would love perfume shopping with me because I just had this natural ability to break down scents.”
Deciding to launch her first fragrance, however, wasn’t as simple as just wanting to do it. She had no industry connections, no investors, no experience in perfume manufacturing. “I thought, who am I to make a perfume brand? Who am I—how am I even going to f—king make sales?” What she did have, though, was a clear vision. Eventually, her friend connected her with a perfumer who had worked with several major fragrance brands like Fragrance Du Bois and Arabian Oud. “I walked into his office, surrounded by rows of fragrance oils, and for the first time, I saw a world I wanted to be a part of,” she reveals.
Thus, Kheir Fragrance House launched in 2023. The duo spent months refining her first fragrance, Seven Minutes. She wanted it to be layered, intriguing, unexpected. “It starts off playful, like a vanilla caramel milkshake—super sweet and innocent. But then it dries down into something musky, salty, and woody. It’s two different identities, just like me.” The name itself was a nod to Seven Minutes in Heaven, the childhood game where two people are locked in a closet together—awkward, innocent, and full of anticipation.
Pre-orders were opened in mid-July. As the bottles were on route to America on the plane, they’d already sold out.
“I was shocked,” she admits, joking, “At first, I thought I could never make it in perfumery because I’m too critical, but the hater in me actually made me powerful in the industry.”
She also made a TikTok about the launch and it got 20,000 or 30,000 likes, which “I think helped a lot with bringing us out there,” she says.
Today, Kheir boasts six fragrances, all manufactured in the South of France; Grasse, to be more specific. The fragrances follow the same philosophy as Seven Minutes—complex, evolving, and unexpected. Slow Sip opens with a burst of juicy mango but then darkens into amber and deep woods. Guilty Pleasures is nutty and chocolate-y, with notes of ambergris and myrhh, designed to linger on the skin. “Our motto is to blend the traditions of the East with the trends of the West— so like smelling edible like a cupcake or a glazed donut, while holding that Middle Eastern tradition in perfumery of the dark musks and the incense and the ouds.”
Cyrine is involved in Kheir Fragrance House from start to finish—every bottle, every scent, every creative decision passes through her hands. From selecting raw materials and tweaking formulations to approving packaging and handling logistics, she’s at the center of it all. “Every single aspect of Kheir, from start to finish, is me. From the pictures you see on the packaging to the color of the silk in the perfume boxes. Even the bottles, I sketched them out in a notebook with a ruler. I wanted it just how I thought it in my head, because as much as I could describe it to someone else, nobody will be able to know what the f—ck I’m talking about,” she muses.
Now, Kheir Fragrance House is carving out its place in an industry that’s notoriously difficult to break into. The limited drops only add to the allure. Each release is small-batch, carefully curated, and quickly snatched up. Resellers have started flipping bottles, proof of the cult following she’s building.
As for those looking to start their own business? Cyrine has some advice. “Go with your gut and just do it. If I listened to other people, I would still be here today looking up names and trying to come up with a logo. You just have to follow your intuition because at the end of the day, it’s your brand and your vision. Why are you going to let other people tell you it’s not going to work when you’re the one making something in your head come to life?”
What’s next? Growth, but on her terms. “Our main goal is to be working with the right distributors to end up in some stores and we’ve been playing it really well with being exclusive and limited,” shares the entrepreneur. “We’re laser focused on maintaining the value and integrity of the brand. We’re not just another perfume brand you could just get anywhere, anytime. Fragrance is so niche, and it’s really hard to break into. I got so lucky that I was able to formulate something so quickly— Well, maybe I wouldn’t say lucky… because the product is actually really good.”
