The Galbanum Ancestor and the Ancient Roots of Healing in P-Beauty
Written by Serineh Paria, Co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty
Serineh Paria is the co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty, a Persian botanical skincare house that pairs ancestral botanicals with modern formulation. After 15 years in vascular ultrasound, including directing seven clinics, she writes about heritage beauty, clinical precision, and building a brand from the lab table up.
In my father’s village, donkey bone marrow oil was already a revered, traditional remedy for healing wounds. But the animals in his specific village were different, they grazed wild on galbanum flowers. My great-uncle recognized this unique vitality and took the traditional marrow extraction a step further. He combined the marrow with the raw resin and the extracted oil of the actual galbanum flower itself.
That specific formulation was a revelation. It was so potent that it became legendary in our community. It didn’t just treat the skin, it performed miracles. That ancestral oil has remained in my family for generations. It healed me, and years later, it beautifully healed a stubborn scar on my daughter. I still use it today.
What I didn’t know I was holding
When Mina and I started ZAA’N Beauty, galbanum was the first botanical I reached for. Not because it was trending. It wasn’t. It was already in my hands.
I studied it. Galbanum has been used for centuries to help ulcers heal, calm inflammation, and soften skin. The resin has antimicrobial properties. Modern cosmetic science is still catching up to what village medicine already knew. I had seen what ulcers do to a person.
I spent fifteen years in vascular ultrasound, eventually growing into managing seven clinics and training the physicians and technologists inside them. I have looked at more leg ulcers than I can count, the kind that do not heal, the kind that keep someone in a chair. Too often, the standard approach treats the ulcer like a plumbing problem. Galbanum treats it like a wound that needs to close.
I never thought I would leave medicine. It was my identity. It was the thing people called me for.
But you grow. You outgrow one part of yourself the way a tree outgrows a branch, not because the branch was wrong, but because the tree needed room. I still love medicine. I still teach. I still speak. I was just invited to speak for the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonography (ARDMS) next year, with reach across 150 countries, and I am so proud I could cry. I will keep doing that.
Deep down, though, in the place where you do not perform for anyone, I am enjoying what I am doing now. More than a clinic. More than a title. This is the first work that feels like it was waiting for me.
The cream that broke me
Mina and I share a tradition with a third friend, every year, on the first day of school, the three of us meet for breakfast. We have kept it for eight years. At that breakfast, on August 13, 2025, I finally said the words I had been avoiding, “Let’s do it.”
She cried. Real tears. She had wanted this for years.
We started with tiny batches. The first creams were thick and oily. They sat on the skin like they were apologizing. My reaction, which I will never live down, was, “Nooooo.”
I could not make a lotion that did not feel like cooking oil, yet. But everything my years of work had taught me said we would get there. If you fail the first time, and even the second, it means you are doing something real. Every failed batch was not a setback. It was a step.
I took courses. I filled a notebook with emulsifiers. We failed, cried, changed ratios, tried again. Slowly, the texture came closer to what we wanted.
In a world full of white labels, we could have taken the shortcut. We never wanted that. We wanted to own our formulas, to create them ourselves and understand every ingredient in every jar. Maybe that is what medicine did to my personality, I need to know everything. Not to control it. To understand it. These formulas live in my head, and they always will.
There is something sweet about coming back to chemistry. In school, it was the subject I always got an A+ in, and now I understand why, it was waiting for me too. Today, our formulas are built on peptide cocktails and unusual botanicals, each one extracted in the specific oil that suits it best, the one that draws out everything the plant has to give.
Mina is the easygoing one. I like a system. When I get worked up, she brings the fire down. We don’t fight.
The woman who carried the fire
Mina is not Zoroastrian the way people say they are Zoroastrian. She grew up inside it. She comes from the generations, an unbroken family line that carried the old fire forward when the world tried to put it out.
I am Persian Armenian. I grew up in Iran too, but my door into Persia was different, the church, my father’s family, that village oil. Mina’s door was the flame itself, the rituals, the calendar, the knowledge that survived because her people refused to let it die until it reached her.
She is teaching me. Not from a lecture. The way you learn a language, by sitting next to someone who speaks it like breathing.
Every time she shares something, I feel the gap between what I thought I knew about my own culture and what was waiting there all along.
She is my soul sister. An angel God placed in my path at the exact moment I needed her, carrying the knowledge I was missing.
There is always a reason someone is in your life. I believe that now more than I ever have.
Mina is the pillar of this business. She has generations of history behind her. We are not starting something new. We are continuing something old. She is the one carrying that fire forward.
I cannot imagine doing this with anyone else.
Persepolis, Cyrus the Great, and why we named it ZAA’N Beauty
When I think about Persia, I start with Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of the empire of Cyrus the Great.
Under Cyrus the Great, and later Darius, that world was ahead of its time for women. Women worked. Women held property. Women had standing in marriage, divorce, and inheritance. During childbirth, they were attended and given space. A woman was not an afterthought. She had a place.
That is why we named it ZAA’N Beauty. Zan means woman. We wanted to bring back the beauty of the woman, not as a slogan, but as a reminder that in our culture, women already carried respect, long before anyone had to fight for it.
Until everything changed. We pray for freedom, the kind where a woman can build, speak, and create without asking permission.
P beauty is not a trend
Mina and I talk about K beauty and J beauty, and how a culture can introduce itself through its ingredients. We want that curiosity for Persian beauty.
For us, P beauty is Persian botanicals, the historical knowledge that made them matter, and the modern formulation methods we study. Not a marketing angle. A lineage.
I want someone to put a cream on their face, feel something they cannot name, and then look up where galbanum comes from. Not because we told them to. Because the product made them curious.
That is the work I belong in.
What I am still figuring out
We still send each other notes about plants. The research conversation is never finished. Batches still fail. We still have things to learn.
I am so glad I said, “Let’s do it.”
Mina’s story, the fire she carried before I ever met her, is hers to tell. When she does, you will understand why I could not have built this with anyone else.
Follow what Mina and I are creating at ZAA’N Beauty.
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Read more from Serineh Paria
Serineh Paria, Co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty
Serineh Paria is the co-founder of ZAA’N Beauty, where Persian botanicals meet modern cosmetic science. She spent 15 years in vascular ultrasound, six of them as a director across seven clinics, with work in quality assurance, accreditation, and training. That clinical discipline now shapes how she formulates small-batch skincare in the United States. She built ZAA’N with her co-founder, Mina Mandkarian, to introduce P-beauty, Persian beauty, to readers who know K-beauty and J-beauty, but not this heritage. Serineh still teaches and speaks in the vascular field, including upcoming work with ARDMS communities, while writing about ritual, formulation, and the courage to start something of her own.
