London, June 2026 There is a specific kind of betrayal that comes from trusting a professional and walking away worse. Inês Abdalla knows it intimately.
Inês was 21 years old. She went to a clinic. She had a chemical exfoliation carried out by someone who was supposed to know what they were doing. What followed wasn’t the clear, refreshed skin she’d been promised. It was severe rebound pigmentation, the kind that doesn’t resolve in a week, or a month, or six months. The kind that changes how you see yourself in the mirror every morning. The kind that stays.
“I lost my confidence completely,” she says now, from her base between London and Riyadh. “You look in the mirror and your skin is worse than before you started. You trusted someone. You paid someone. That’s a particular kind of damage not just physical.”
What came after that experience wasn’t bitterness. It was a study. Inês made a decision that she was going to understand, properly and scientifically, what had happened to her skin and why. That path led her to Skin Masterclass, the skincare science programme founded by Cigdem Kemal, a turning point she credits as the moment her personal obsession became professional expertise.
“Cigdem’s programme changed how I see everything,” Inês says. “It gave me the framework to read a formulation, understand what it’s actually doing inside the skin, and recognise when something is going to cause harm before it does. That knowledge is the foundation everything at InêSKN is built on.”
From there, she went deeper still. She wanted to know how the barrier actually functions, what ingredients do and don’t do at a cellular level, where the clinical evidence points versus where the industry’s marketing machine points, and how vast the gap between those two things really is.
It turned out to be enormous.
“The more I learned, the more I realised that what happened to me wasn’t a one off. Women are being failed constantly by clinics, by brands, by online influencers with no qualifications, by an industry that profits from confusion and insecurity. I couldn’t keep that to myself.”
That decision to share what she’d learned rather than sit on it became the foundation of everything that followed.
InêSKN: where the science comes first
InêSKN launched as an answer to the question Inês kept being asked: What should I actually be doing with my skin?
The answer, she found, was almost always simpler than what her clients had been told. Most women who found their way to her virtual consultancy had already tried everything ten step routines built around whatever ingredient had trended that month, harsh exfoliants used daily on compromised skin, retinoids layered over acids over serums in combinations that made dermatologists wince. They weren’t lazy or uninformed. They’d followed the advice. The advice was wrong.
“The skin doesn’t need twenty products,” Inês says. “It needs the right ones. And most women have never been told which ones those are or why the rest are quietly making things worse.”
InêSKN’s consultations are built around a small group of actives with strong, consistent clinical evidence behind them: vitamin C for antioxidant protection and pigmentation; ceramides for barrier repair; peptides for collagen support; broad-spectrum antioxidants for environmental defence. What Inês does not recommend is equally deliberate. Fragrance, alcohol, and common irritants are filtered out regardless of how popular the product containing them happens to be.
It’s a less-is-more philosophy in a category that has made its money insisting the opposite.
“The beauty industry needs you to keep buying. That means constantly introducing new ingredients, new routines, new problems to solve. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what actually works for your specific skin, in the long run, without causing new damage in the process.”
The consultancy is fully virtual, which was a deliberate choice. Inês wanted women anywhere in London, in Riyadh, in Dubai to be able to access the same quality of science-led guidance. She also built in something most consultancies don’t offer: genuine access. Clients can reach out between sessions. They can ask questions. They get real answers, without being pushed toward a purchase.
“We built a space where women aren’t judged for what they’ve been doing wrong. No sales agenda. They come with their skin and they leave with information. That’s the whole offer.”
The hardest part wasn’t the science
Building InêSKN required Inês to become something she hadn’t entirely anticipated: a deprogrammer.
The hardest part of the work, she says, has never been the science. It’s been the unlearning helping women let go of beliefs about skincare they’ve held for years, sometimes decades, that were doing them real harm.
“People don’t like being told that what they’ve believed for a long time is wrong. I understand that. I had to go through it myself. So, I try to make it feel less like a correction and more like a door opening here’s what we thought, here’s what we now know, here’s what that means for your routine.”
That process takes time. It requires trust. And it means Inês has had to be as committed to education and communication as she is to the clinical knowledge itself. Inês runs weekly webinars. She produces educational content across social platforms, consistently not the kind designed to sell a product but the kind designed to actually teach something. She shows up every day in digital communities where women are asking the questions the industry isn’t answering honestly.
“Visibility is credibility,” she says. “Before someone will trust your expertise, they need to see it repeatedly. I don’t run ads. I show up every day and share what I know. That’s the strategy. It compounds.”
It has compounded. InêSKN now serves a growing client base across the UK and Gulf markets. New business comes primarily through direct referral, the most durable kind, from clients who have seen real results and told someone they care about.
The Gulf dimension
Inês splits her time between London and Riyadh, and that dual positioning is not incidental to her business. It’s central to it.
The Gulf market, she argues, has distinct skin concerns that most Western brands address poorly, if at all. High UV index year-round. Humidity and heat that compromise certain formulations. Hormonal and dietary factors specific to the region that affect how skin behaves. And a cultural context around women’s beauty practices, around what access to expertise looks like, around language that a brand based solely in London cannot credibly claim to understand.
Hassan can. She was born in London, has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, is in the process of formally establishing Inês Al Arabia for Cosmetics in MENA, and speaks Arabic across Gulf, Saudi, Egyptian, and North African dialects. When she says she understands both markets, she means it in the fullest sense.
“There is an enormous appetite in the Gulf for beauty expertise that is actually grounded in science and that speaks to the specific challenges of the region. The market is there. The trust has to be built. I’m building it.”
Inês Cosmetics: the lash brand built on the same principle
InêSKN is not Inês’s only beauty venture. Inês Cosmetics, her luxury cruelty-free DIY cluster lash extension brand, trading since September 2022, operates on the same founding principle: give women access to professional quality results without requiring them to hand over control to someone else.
The brand targets women who want salon-quality lashes without the salon price point, the appointment dependency, or the ingredient compromises that come with many professional lash products. Everything in the Inês Cosmetics range is cruelty-free. The DIY format is designed to be genuinely usable at home, not just technically possible.
“We believe beauty should be accessible, informed, and never at the expense of your health,” Hassan says. “That applies whether we’re talking about your skincare or your lashes.”
The brand has built its audience through organic social content and educational posts on Instagram, where Inês and her team demystify the application process and address the questions most lash brands don’t bother answering. It is not a coincidence that her two beauty brands share a tone: knowledgeable, direct, and built around the customer’s real questions rather than the brand’s commercial interests.
Recognition
Earlier this year, Inês was named in MSN Magazine’s 10 Trailblazing Women to Follow in 2026, a recognition of her work across both beauty brands and her growing public profile as an educator and entrepreneur. In May 2026, she was featured as a Face of WOHA at the Women of Heart Awards ceremony in London, where she was recognised alongside fellow women building significant careers across multiple sectors.
She holds an MBA from Oneday Business School, a certification in AI, and completed skincare science training under Cigdem Kemal at Skin Masterclass, the programme she credits as the professional turning point that took her from personal experience to clinical expertise.
YIP: the same philosophy, applied to founders
This month, Inês launches the next phase of a third venture, one that takes the education-first model she built in skincare and applies it to entrepreneurship itself.
YIP Your Intellectual Partner is a founder education community targeting entrepreneurs and scale-ups across the UK and Gulf markets. It is structured around three things Hassan says she wished had existed when she was starting out: a serious curriculum, mentors who have actually done what they’re teaching, and a peer community of founders who hold each other to a high standard.
“Everything I built in skincare started from learning the hard way and deciding to share what I found,” she says. “YIP is the same thing for founders. You shouldn’t have to make every mistake yourself to build a real business. The knowledge exists. The people who have it exist. The gap is access and that’s what I’m closing.”
YIP’s Founder Growth Lab launches June 15th, 2026. The programme includes a four-month curriculum across multiple tracks, mentors spanning finance, brand identity, distribution strategy, and AI, and a community designed to run across both the UK and Gulf founder ecosystems.
It is, in many ways, the most personal of Inês’s three ventures, the one that most directly addresses the isolation and misinformation she navigated as a founder herself. And it carries the same commitment as InêSKN: that expertise should not be a luxury available only to those with the right connections.
“I built all three of these businesses for the same person,” Inês says. “The woman who was let down by an industry that should have helped her. Whether that’s skincare, lashes, or building a business from scratch she deserves better access to real knowledge. That’s what all of this is.”
About Inês Abdalla
Inês Abdalla Hassan is a London-born entrepreneur based between London and Riyadh. Inês is the founder and CEO of three ventures: InêSKN, a science-led virtual skincare consultancy (ineskn.co.uk); Inês Cosmetics, a luxury cruelty-free DIY cluster lash extension brand (InesCosmetics), and YIP Your Intellectual Partner, a founder education community for UK and Gulf entrepreneurs (inesabdalla.co.uk). She is currently establishing Inês Al Arabia for Cosmetics in Qatar. She holds an MBA from Oneday Business School, a certification in AI, and has completed skincare science training under Cigdem Kemal at Skin Masterclass. In 2026, she was named in MSN Magazine’s 10 Trailblazing Women to Follow in 2026 and recognised as a 3X Face of WOHA at the Women of Heart Awards, London.
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