Malee Natural Science | www.maleeonline.com
Nigerian-born Zeze Oriaikhi-Sao left London in the UK, where she had lived since her teens, for Johannesburg, South Africa in 2008. A recent business school graduate, Zeze was struck by the very dif ferent South African climate and how her skin and hair felt parched by the drier air. This became the drive for her to create Malee Science, a luxury fragrance, bath and body care range inspired by generations of African healing rituals and time-honoured beauty traditions. This ancient wisdom advocated the powerful healing properties of 100% pure plant-based ingredients from nature itself. These traditions live on in Malee, with ef ficacy proven by modern science.
‘Malee’ is a term of endearment in Bini (a language spoken by people in the Edo Kingdom, Nigeria). “It means gracious, learned woman and it is what my grandmother was called”, Zeze explains. Everything about this luxury brand is considered – including the logo, represented by a series of three circular shapes within each other, taken from the Adinkra symbols of the Asante nation in Ghana.
For Zeze, it was important to capture the essence of the African continent in fragrance, understanding scent as a powerful trigger for imagination and memory. The brand has successfully done this through three fragrance pillar features across all its products: