Myra Qureshi: Told Pakistan to Drop the Whitening Creams

In Pakistan’s beauty industry, the bestsellers promise one thing: lighter skin.

Whitening creams dominate the shelves. Some are laced with mercury. Others contain steroids. Many aren’t labeled honestly. For decades, they’ve sold the same toxic fantasy: that fair skin will get you the job, the husband, the respect. That your natural color is a problem to be fixed.

Myra Qureshi looked at that industry and decided to build something better.

The Return

Myra didn’t need to come back to Pakistan.

She had the résumé that opens doors anywhere: an LSE degree, an Executive MBA from Georgetown, ESADE, years at Deloitte, Citi, and ING Bank. Thirteen years abroad. Over a hundred countries visited.

But when she returned to Lahore in 2013, she found a problem that wouldn’t let her go.

“I saw everyday creams filled with mercury and steroids being sold as ‘miracle’ products,” she says. “Counterfeit cosmetics. Misleading labels. Women putting toxic ingredients on their skin without knowing what was inside. No one was talking about it.”

So she started building.

What She Built

In 2014, Myra and her sister Rema Taseer launched Conatural with seven products and a radical premise: beauty shouldn’t require poison.

One of Pakistan’s first natural and organic skincare brands. No whitening creams. No toxic chemicals. No lies on the label. Just products formulated with ingredients you could actually pronounce, manufactured in Lahore, and designed for South Asian skin.

The industry said it wouldn’t work.
Consumers wanted whitening.
Retailers wanted whitening.

Myra built anyway.

By 2020, Conatural had grown to more than 50 products, retail partnerships across Pakistan, and exports to the UK and UAE. That year, mid-pandemic, she raised $825,000 in pre-Series A funding, one of the largest early-stage investments ever raised by a female-founded startup in Pakistan.

She was 37.

In 2023, she raised an additional USD $1 million in Series B funding, scaling Conatural’s footprint even further.

The Quieter Rebellion

Myra doesn’t call it rebellion. She talks about quality. Standards. Teaching women to read labels.

But what she built is insurgent.

In a market where advertising told women lighter skin meant better lives, Conatural ran campaigns against skin bleaching. In an industry where only 3% of startup funding goes to female founders, she built a company with 70% female employment. In a culture where young women are taught to downplay achievements, she stood in investor meetings and asked for money.

“I always find myself saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I,’” she admits. “Using the first person feels arrogant. I’m petrified that if someone knows it’s just me in control, the value will go down.”

She raised the money anyway.

Why She Matters

Every Conatural bottle sitting next to a whitening cream is a counter-narrative. Every woman who chooses natural ingredients over bleach is voting with her rupees. Every label that tells the truth makes the lies harder to sell.

Myra proved that Pakistani consumers will choose integrity if you give them the option. She built a business that competes globally, not by copying Western formulas, but by solving a problem they never had to face.

“If we didn’t believe deep in our hearts that these are the most untarnished, unadulterated, accurately labeled, nourishing beauty products,” she says, “we wouldn’t put our names on them.”

Myra Qureshi is changing what beauty means, through market share, not manifestos.

She didn’t argue with the industry.
She outperformed it.

That’s rebellion with receipts.