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How Zëiyt is turning cultural provenance into emotional value

ZËIYT, UK

Middle East – Beauty brand Zëiyt is drawing on Palestinian heritage and generational ritual to position olive oil as a skincare ingredient and a cultural artefact.

Founded by Scandinavian-Palestinian creative Gina Dirawi, the brand launched with a product line that uses hand-picked olives sourced from ancient groves in the West Bank, some from trees believed to be up to 3,000 years old.

Zëiyt derives its name from the Arabic word for oil, zayt, combined with Dirawi’s grandmother’s surname. Products are named after her grandmothers, reinforcing the role of lineage and storytelling, while reframing oiling as a healing practice and a connection to identity.

This echoes insights from our The Great Beauty Blur report, where we analysed how local rituals, cultural heritage and traditional aesthetics are redefining contemporary beauty.

The launch of Zëiyt also spotlights the pressures facing Palestinian olive farming: the UN documented 86 olive-harvest-related attacks in 2025, disrupting production and damaging thousands of trees.

Strategic opportunity

Move beyond ingredient transparency by tracing products back to place, people and ritual. Embed cultural provenance into packaging, content and retail experiences to create deeper emotional value

Foresight Friday: Alice Crossley, deputy foresight editor

Every Friday, we offer an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, deputy foresight editor Alice Crossley asks, ‘Have we reached peak influencer?’

: Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a steady rise in brands and editorial outlets using user-generated content, low-fi content and ‘real people’, raising the question, have we reached peak influencer?

: i-D magazine is interviewing and photographing South London’s youth population about their beauty secrets and gym-bros about their best features, and face-timing (rather than photo-shooting) celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson. Elsewhere, H&M’s S/S 2026 Collection is captured using self-portraits of its models.

: Self-portraiture isn’t new, but these signal the convergence of two of The Future Laboratory’s biggest trends of 2026: The Great Beauty Blur and (soon-to-be-published) The Tech Resistors. i-D magazine photographing real people speaks to the monotonous lethargy of the picture-perfect beauty industry and a pendulum swing back towards individuality and finding beauty in imperfection. The low-fi aesthetics also appeal to the deep nostalgia many of us feel for a time before phone cameras could capture every pore on your face and 99% of our days were spent glued to screens.

: It’s not revolutionary, but it feels exciting and refreshing – more normal faces, thinking outside the box and experimental, please!

AI imagery by The Future Laboratory, UK

Quote of the week

‘Beauty, it turns out, is a blush as a personality enhancer, olive oil from the kitchen cupboard, Mac strobe dewy skin tint at uni, a Starface patch just because. Beauty is a romance novel before lights-out. It’s being proud of your mum’s features, of being trans, of bucking trends, and still asking yourself what others think. It’s worrying you look cool, or out of place, or like a bitch – and knowing you’re not. Mostly, it’s that transcendent split second when you forget to consider how you look at all’

Francesc Planes, journalist, i-D

Stat: Gen Z fathers in Australia lean into traditional provider roles

Faces of Travel by Delta Air Lines and Adobe, US

Australia – Most Gen Z fathers in Australia believe financial provision is their primary role, highlighting persistent traditional attitudes despite broader shifts towards gender equality.

According to the State of the World’s Fathers Report by The Fathering Project and Western Sydney University, 72% of Gen Z fathers (aged 18–28) agree that ‘a father’s sole responsibility is to provide financially for his children’. This compares with 61% of Millennials and 57% of Gen X.

The survey also found 65% of Gen Z respondents believe ‘things are better if men do paid work and women do care work’. Millennials recorded similar views (66%), while Gen X was lower at 45%.

More than 90% of parents said care is as important as paid work and that men who share caregiving are good partners. However, structural barriers remain. The report notes that ‘although many fathers aspire to be emotionally engaged caregivers, their involvement is often constrained’ by long work hours, inflexible employment and entrenched gender norms.

Researchers add that financial insecurity is a stronger driver of traditional views than income itself, reinforcing gendered roles across younger generations.

Read our Gen Z Parents and Decoding Masculinity reports to explore how male consumers’ attitudes towards fatherhood, responsibility and identity are evolving.

Strategic opportunity

Gen Z fathers feel pressure to earn but lack time. Create convenience-led services, time-saving subscriptions and family coordination tools that enable more equal household responsibility