AIYA philosophy
A New Standard of Beauty Rooted in Ancestral Intelligence
The AIYA Story
An initiation, a return
AIYA philosophy
Rooted in Ancestral Wisdom
AIYA Mission
To restore a sacred standard of beauty,
AIYA is not just a brand.
It is a movement of return.
A return to slowness.
To integrity. To sacred self-reverence.
A vision of beauty that belongs to all of us,
rooted, ritualised, and radically alive.
The AIYA Story
I grew up in East Africa, immersed in Indigenous tradition, community healing, and the powerful medicine of nature. The women who raised me. my mother, my grandmother, carried a knowing that was felt more than taught. Their hands, their rituals, their stories were my first textbooks.
I watched them blend oils with herbs, prepare salves in clay bowls, whisper prayers into their hands as they massaged love into our skin. Skincare wasn’t a commodity. it was communion.
Somewhere in the noise of modern life, we lost that.
We forgot the rhythms. The slowness. The respect for land and lineage.
This is not just skincare.
It’s a remembering.
A restoration.
An offering from my lineage to yours.
AIYA Skin holds the resonance of Life, Love & Liberty.
You are invited to be part of our story.
"AIYA means Mother in my native tongue a word that echoes through generations, drenched in care, protection, and profound wisdom." ~ Kagi
AIYA philosophy
A New Standard of Beauty. Rooted in Ancestral Wisdom
In a skincare market saturated with trends, AIYA is a brand that doesn’t just disrupt it remembers. Born not from commercial ambition but from maternal devotion and ancestral knowledge, AIYA is a return to something older, wiser, and far more essential: skincare as ceremony, rooted in legacy.
Founded by Dhabakaya (Kagi), a mother and formulator of African descent, AIYA is the culmination of a deeply personal journey one that traverses continents, bloodlines, and the politics of survival. Raised between cultures and shaped by the aftermath of asylum and generational displacement, Kagi’s story is steeped in resilience. But it’s her reverence for what has survived ritual, land-based medicine, the intelligence of women’s bodies that gives AIYA its rare potency.
The range, though minimal in appearance, is anything but simple. Each formulation is hand-blended in small batches using grass-fed tallow and ethically sourced botanicals, infused with wild-sourced ingredients like frankincense, myrrh, lemon myrtle, and wild cherry. But this is not an aesthetic play at ‘natural beauty.’ It’s a philosophy.
AIYA is skincare designed not to correct, conceal, or commodify but to nourish. To protect. To restore. It is a sensory return to what was once known: that the body is worthy of devotion, and the skin is a site of memory.
What distinguishes AIYA is not only the quality of its ingredients or the elegance of its formulations, but its cultural intelligence. The brand exists in conversation with lineage. It honours the matriarchs who healed with what they had, who preserved identity through ritual, and who passed down wisdom in whispers and acts of care.
This is not minimalist beauty. This is ancestral maximalism a deep, embodied knowing that less is more when what remains is potent, pure, and rooted in truth.
AIYA is not just a skincare brand.
It is a reclamation of beauty as heritage.
A grounded luxury for women who value integrity, ritual, and the medicine of memory.
In a world looking for the next new thing, AIYA offers something rare:
a return.
