ABOUT

We manufacture the traditional Chébé powder. This powder is the ancestral secret of Chadian women that allows them to keep the hair hydrated and strong so that the hair does not break and becomes very long. You will also find in our shop traditional Chadian beauty products. Our business aims to spread the beauty rituals from the Sahel.

Sahel Cosmetics was created in 2017 by Gwen, the French youtuber of Chadian origin known as Miss Sahel. Born to Chadian parents, she grew up and lived all her life in France. She would visit her relatives in Chad during vacations and it always used to be a pleasure for her discovering different facets of her own culture.

While working in a full-time job in Paris in her early twenties, she was also working on a lifestyle and beauty blog of her own. As a girl, she was always interested in make-up and lifestyle-related things. She was and still is, a firm believer of the fact that knowledge is the key and you should never stop learning about new things. So she developed a habit of learning more and more about the things that interested her. In that respect, YouTube and Google have been her best teachers! Eventually, She realised that the videos had more appeal so she decided to start her own YouTube channel called as Miss Sahel.

In may 2017, she posted a video about the Bassara Arab women of the West African Sahara Sahel region, who have very long hair. Usually, the African women have short hair not because it doesn't grow, but because it is very dry and breaks easily. But the traditional hair-care that the Bassara women use helps them to have waist-length hair. The video was a big success and had millions of views. She got so many requests from a lot of black women around the globe for the products that these women used so she knew she had found her business idea. To explore this further, She decided to quit her job in Paris and shift to N'djamena. Something that started as a hobby now has been converted into an enterprise and is creating jobs for people in Chad.

She likes to encourage on social media the youth like her from the African diaspora to return to the continent because it is changing so fast, and everything needs to be built up. If you have a good idea, if you are intelligent, creative and if you have the right set of skills, Africa is the place to be. There's a lot of scope for progress. You can live a very comfortable life here. Seriously, gone are the days of a traditional subway, work, sleep routines! It's the age of entrepreneurship! Africa can benefit from your talent and in return, you can benefit from its growing economy.