Lattafa Explains Gen Z’s Middle Eastern Perfume Obsession

Times of Dubai was on the floor at Beautyworld Dubai’s landmark 30th edition. Lattafa at Beautyworld Dubai 2026 revealed exactly what keeps a generation reaching for another bottle.

There is a particular kind of magic that happens when you walk into a fragrance hall at full capacity. Thousands of scents layering over each other, glass flacons catching the light, and somewhere in the middle of it all, a crowd forming so quickly and so completely that you almost do not notice it until you are already part of it.

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That is what Beautyworld Dubai does. And in its 30th edition, held from October 6th to 8th at Dubai World Trade Centre, it did it better than it ever has before.

Times of Dubai was on the ground for all three days as the global beauty industry descended on Za’abeel Hall. It was not simply a trade show reaching a milestone anniversary. Vendors showcased innovations, fragrances, skincare lines, and new formats that encouraged direct conversations with buyers.

It was a very public declaration that the centre of gravity in global beauty has moved. Lattafa at Beautyworld Dubai 2026 underscores this shift. From the raised voices on the floor to the new partnerships forming in booths, the scene signaled a lasting change in where beauty power now resides.

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Times of Dubai Meets Lattafa

Among the houses that defined this edition’s fragrance story, Lattafa Perfumes stood out for the scale of its presentation. It clarified why it matters, and Lattafa Beautyworld Dubai 2026 helped readers see the impact.

Times of Dubai sat down with Amber Rehman, Head of Global Marketing at Lattafa Perfumes, to ask the question that the industry has been circling for years: why does Gen Z love Middle Eastern fragrance so much, and why does Lattafa in particular hold such a strong grip on that generation’s attention?

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Her answer was delivered without hesitation.

Because Lattafa never sleeps,” she said. “Lattafa is a fragrance house which believes in delighting the consumers. We always come up with something very interesting, something very unique from what we have launched the previous couple of weeks. So we just continue hitting the dopamine with the consumers in terms of giving them something new every time that we launch. Just this year alone, we have launched over 13 new fragrances, and that is why Gen Zs really love us, because every time they just look up to us for something that’s more exciting, that is something unique.”

Hitting the dopamine. It is a phrase worth sitting with, because it describes something that most legacy fragrance houses have spent decades trying to figure out and Lattafa has built into its operating model by instinct.

Rehman continued: “Most of the discovery happens on social media. In fact, Lattafa is a brand that is Gen Z discovered on social media. TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, they’re all very important in terms of the discovery process. We are the most popular fragrance when it comes to Amazon, TikTok, Meta channels.” The numbers behind that claim are not modest. Lattafa is currently present in over 140 countries. Its products appear with regularity on TikTok’s most-engaged fragrance content. Its price positioning, premium enough to feel like a considered purchase and accessible enough not to require one, sits at exactly the intersection where Gen Z makes most of its beauty decisions.

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At Beautyworld Dubai, Lattafa used the occasion to unveil three new fragrances: Khamrah Mira, Fearless and Beyond Precious. Khamrah Mira marks the launch of a feminine pillar within the house’s beloved Khamrah franchise. Lattafa’s stand brought together distributors, retailers, media, content creators and agencies for conversations centred on one theme: growth across borders.

Lattafa is unique in the way that it is born out of the Middle East, but loved all over the world,” Rehman said. “The bigger plan is to stay at the top and continue growing.”

Fragrance Found Its Moment

Of all the categories that defined the 30th edition, fragrance made the most unmistakable case for the region’s arrival on the global stage.

For the first time in the show’s history, fragrance expanded into a dedicated hall, bringing the world’s leading ingredient houses — Givaudan, dsm-firmenich, Symrise and Takasago among them — into the same physical space as the Gulf’s rapidly growing finished fragrance brands. The symbolism was intentional and the reality even more interesting: a market that once imported scent is now exporting it, with UAE fragrance houses reaching consumers in over a hundred countries.

Bollywood icon Salman Khan arrived as chief guest on opening day as Dubai’s Rasasi Perfumes unveiled Kenz de Rasasi, a new luxury fragrance house. The aisles filled within minutes. Hundreds of people moved toward a single point of the hall with the kind of collective instinct that has less to do with marketing and more to do with genuine desire to be present for something.

Armaf ran what it called The Armaf Hour at 12:30pm each day, launching one fragrance per session: Club de Nuit Intense Fuego, Club de Nuit Lady Bling and Club de Nuit Précieux II. Each session drew more than a hundred people. Entrepreneur and Dubai Bling personality Ebraheem Al Samadi joined on day two. Emirati creator Khalid Al Ameri appeared on day three. The combination of fragrance, community and personality is not accidental. It is exactly how the category has learned to reach a generation whose purchasing decisions happen on screens before they happen in stores.

What the Show Said About Fragrance

The conversation Times of Dubai had with Amber Rehman was not an isolated observation. It was a thread running through the entire edition’s fragrance programme.

At Next in Fragrance, Jenine Guerriero, Head of Marketing and Consumer Insights Fine Fragrance at Givaudan, described a generation that approaches scent the way it approaches music playlists, not as a single signature but as a rotating ecosystem, layered and personalised.

“Younger consumers are building their own worlds and curating their own feeds, so of course they are designing their own fragrance ecosystems,” she said. “They are not wearing just one fragrance anymore. They are layering and creating their own fragrance workflows. What they really want is performance, what we call wow-on-spray. They want people to notice them.”

That description maps precisely onto Lattafa’s commercial instinct. A house that launches over thirteen fragrances in a single year is not confused about its strategy. It is feeding exactly the discovery-driven, variety-hungry, social-first consumer that Guerriero described. The more there is to discover, the more there is to post. The more there is to post, the wider the audience that discovers it.

Middle Eastern fragrance has spent decades as the world’s best-kept secret. It is now one of its most-searched categories. Lattafa Beautyworld Dubai 2026 highlights this shift.

Thirty Years and a Billion Dollar Weekend

Beautyworld Dubai did not begin as the powerhouse it is today. When the first edition opened three decades ago, the Gulf was largely a market that the international beauty industry sold into, a destination for product, not a source of it.

The 30th edition closed with 1.19 billion US dollars in reported business across three days. Sixty-two thousand visitors passed through its halls. Forty-two percent of them flew in from outside the UAE, representing countries from Brazil to the United Kingdom, France to Saudi Arabia, Korea to the United States. One thousand three hundred exhibitors from 56 countries set up on the floor, 239 of them attending for the very first time. Across 1,324 exhibitor interviews, 51,614 deals were reported across the three days. Day three alone generated 18,956 deals worth 460 million dollars.

Those are not the numbers of a regional trade show. Those are the numbers of an industry centrepiece.

Ravi Ramchandani, Event Director of Beautyworld Dubai, put the transformation plainly. “When this show began 30 years ago, the industry came here to sell. Today, it comes to discover, to invest and to learn. That is the real story of this edition, not just how much happened over three days, but what it says about where the centre of gravity in beauty is moving.”

The Talent, the Awards and the Bigger Picture

Beyond fragrance, Beautyworld Dubai’s 30th edition made an equally strong statement about where global beauty talent chooses to show up.

Makeup artists Mary Phillips, Patrick Ta, Mounir and others performed and taught across The Makeup Studio and beautyLIVE stage to professional audiences who would otherwise have little direct access to that level of craft. On the closing day, the Spanish World Champions of Hair brought a finale of technique and creativity that treated the show’s final hours with the same gravity as its opening.

Patrick Ta, speaking at his Makeup Studio masterclass, said something that resonated well beyond the context of a beauty trade show. “When my partner and I decided to start a brand, we had no idea where to begin. We spent the first six months just figuring out where we were going to make the makeup. Being in a space like this, with manufacturers from all around the world, is a great way to understand how to start your own brand.”

The evening before had brought the Beautyworld Dubai Awards, where Huda Kattan was named Icon of the Year, a recognition that carried obvious symbolic weight. The founder of Huda Beauty built one of the most recognisable cosmetics brands of the past decade from Dubai. That the 30th edition chose to honour her on the occasion of its milestone anniversary was not sentiment. It was a statement of where the industry now locates its own origin stories.

What Comes Next

Beautyworld Dubai has called the Dubai World Trade Centre home since its very first edition. In 2027, the show moves to Dubai Exhibition Centre at Expo City Dubai, a venue purpose-built for events that have outgrown their original footprint.

For Lattafa, for the global fragrance houses studying the Gulf’s growing influence, for the Gen Z consumers discovering their next obsession through a 15-second video, and for the brands trying to understand how to reach them, the move signals something straightforward.

This show is not finished growing. Neither is the market it represents.

Thirty editions in, Beautyworld Dubai has become less a regional fixture than a global fixture that happens to be held in this region. The distinction matters. One suggests the world comes here out of courtesy. The other suggests it comes out of necessity.

Samriddhi Yadav

Samriddhi Yadav is a Mass Communication and Journalism student with a strong interest in news writing, current affairs, reporting, and digital journalism. Through her work with Times of Dubai, she focuses on news research, content creation, and developing engaging, informative content for digital audiences. Her interests include media, public affairs, and emerging trends in journalism.

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