April 30, 2026
Before ZËIYT was a beauty brand, it was a memory. For Gina Dirawi — singer-songwriter, artist, TV presenter and founder of Scandi-Palestinian ZËIYT — it began with her grandmothers, Fatima and Ghazali, who kept plates of olive oil around the house, using it to heal their skin and hair, and telling stories of Palestinian groves. Her grandmothers’ relationship with olive trees was a love story, Dirawi would say — and it was that story that ultimately gave birth to ZËIYT.
Dirawi’s own tale with olive trees is a protracted one. At 14, she carried her first olive tree back from Palestine, at her grandmother’s insistence. Then, in her early twenties, Dirawi contracted sepsis and began to lose her hair. That summer, visiting relatives in Palestine, she noticed her family all had thick, long locks. They oiled, they told her. So Dirawi started this ritual, too — and her hair grew back.
It is apt, then, that ZËIYT is built on the concept of return. Its oils are cold-pressed from olives harvested on ancient Palestinian trees, some over 3,000 years old. Every formulation is 100 percent natural, vegan, and non-synthetic, infused with botanicals chosen for both their efficacy and their meaning. “Hands, love, prayers and time” are listed as the ingredients.
The brand launches with two products, each an ode to a grandmother. Fatima’s Nocturne No.1 is a root and hair oil named for the grandmother whose evenings were spent braiding olive oil through her hair. Here, cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil meets basilica root extract — clinically tested to help reduce hair loss by 31 percent — alongside Norwegian microalgae and sacha inchi to strengthen and protect.
Then, Ghazali’s Touch is an all-use anointing oil for body, hair and nails, warm with sandalwood, cinnamon, clove, cedar and vanilla. Each drop, as Dirawi puts it, carries the breath of prophets and holy groves.
To understand ZËIYT, you have to understand what the olive tree means to Palestinians — and what is being done to it. These are not simply crops. They are, as Dirawi says, like family members, passed down through generations, woven into poetry, art, and daily life. The West Bank alone is home to over 9 million olive trees, covering more than half of all agricultural land, and the harvest — which runs October through November — is the economic backbone of rural communities, with over 100,000 families depending on it as a primary source of income.
And yet, since 1967, over 800,000 trees have been uprooted or destroyed, through burning, cutting, and settler violence that extends to physical assaults on farmers during harvest. The loss is not just economic, it is the deliberate erasure of a living inheritance.
When Dirawi returned to Palestine to source oil for ZËIYT, standing among the ancient trees, surrounded by people harvesting, she broke down. “Storytelling connects you to your legacy,” she told us. “You can go back to a place your grandparents were kicked out of 70 or 80 years ago, and it still brings you back.”
That sense of return is threaded through every aspect of ZËIYT’s identity — “a return to the body, a return to nature, a return to being,” as Dirawi described it. She calls the process of building the brand “healing” — a realisation that you can bring your story, your art, and put it into something real.
She was advised by some to soften the brand’s Palestinian references, to not use the word Palestine at all. “That removes the whole point,” she said. ZËIYT is a ritual of remembrance — pressed from trees that have survived millennia, offered now as an act of devotion.
Dining and Cooking