Gisou, the TikTok-Viral Beauty Brand, Is Brought to You by Bees

For Persian New Year, many put together a table setting with symbols of beauty, prosperity, progress, and more, hoping these blessings will be abundant in the next year. For Gisou, these fortunes have already been in the pages. 

The honey-based beauty brand Gisou, which non-coincidentally translates to “hair” in Persian, was founded by Dutch-Iranian blogger Negin Mirsalehi and her fiancé Maurits Stibbe and has seen great success since its official launch in 2015. Over the past few years, Gisou earned a spot in Sephora and amassed TikTok virality — you probably have seen Gisou bottles in the back of GRWMs and even Rodger Cleye memes. The brand has grown so much that they recently expanded their executive office and named their first-ever Chief Beekeeper, Negar Mirsalehi. 

Like her sister Negin, Negar has carried on her family’s legacy of beekeeping, which now dates back six generations, and has even introduced it to her 10-year-old daughter, Cyra, who’s already a bona fide beekeeping prodigy. “You don’t need to be afraid of bees because they won’t harm you,” Cyra tells Teen Vogue, or rather, she softly tells her mother in Dutch, who repeats it in English and explains that Cyra is still learning the language.

Negar, who was born in Iran and immigrated with her family to the Netherlands in the ‘80s, has stayed in touch with her roots through beekeeping. Just like she introduced the practice to Cyra, it was her father who introduced it to her. “My parents came to the Netherlands, and of course, this is a totally new environment for them,” Negar recounts. “They had no family here, no friends. It was quite a culture shock as well. It was new. The first thing my dad did was look for a new bee garden because you always look for parts of your former life where you felt safe, right?” 

Negar’s father found his new bee garden almost immediately, she says, and it became his safe space right away. “That’s where he started to share his knowledge and experience again, which had been shared with him through family.”

While the bee garden doubled as a classroom for Negar, she also shares memories of having picnics and playing in the garden as a child. Now, she’s doing the same with Cyra and her younger daughter Roya, and she says the family even has plans to spend more time together there, prompting a nod of approval from Cyra. 

This balance of work and play is the secret formula behind Gisou’s main ingredients. “The honey and the propolis used in all our products are all from our own Mirsalehi bee garden. All the honey we use in our products has all been harvested by my dad and me,” Negar says.

The other half of Gisou’s origin story comes from Negar and Negin’s mother. She was a hairdresser, whose specialty was honey hair masks. “She would have these bee products from the bee garden, which she used to blend into some things using the honey, which is such a good humectant,” Negar explains, “[Honey] attracts and retains the moisture in your hair and in your skin. She would have these products from our bee garden, which she used to blend into different oils and occasionally fruits like banana and avocado. She would make masks out of it and we would use it in our hair. That’s what we really enjoyed back then. Negin, my sister, perfected it and started the brand and made it even better than it was.”