As an on-air radio personality and four-time Gracie Award winner who has interviewed some of the biggest artists in the world and shared pieces of my life with millions of listeners across California, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle and beyond, you'd think I was at the top.

But, stress was high. I was breaking out badly for the first time since taking Accutane in college, battling inflammation, sitting through doctor after doctor appointment. My face swelled for months. My skin was dull. No one could tell me why.

Then I made myself a cup of the cardamom tea I grew up on. It brought me comfort, but I didn't realize it would save me. I started to feel better.

That sent me down a rabbit hole into the other ingredients I'd grown up eating: saffron, turmeric, pomegranate, walnuts, Persian rose, and dishes like ghormeh sabzi and fesenjan that were suddenly more than food I loved. I'd never thought of any of it as medicine before. That's when it clicked.

Out of frustration one night, I ripped open a used cardamom tea bag and pressed the wet leaves straight onto a blemish. My skin calmed. So did my doubt. If wet leaves from a tea bag could do that, imagine what generations of Persian ritual, blended with modern formulation, could actually do.

I experimented, researched, shopped for spices, made teas and pastes, and started working with the Persian rose oil my father brought me from Iran. The rituals and botanicals I'd grown up around turned out to be part of a much bigger story, and one of the only beauty brands built entirely on Persian roots didn't exist yet. So I built it.

T Bazi, essentially means “Tea Party” in Farsi, is formulated with all-natural ingredients drawn straight from that tradition. Cardamom has calmed skin in Persian rituals for generations. Persian rose has been part of the same rituals for its scent and its softness. Pomegranate was prized by ancient Persians for the same glow people chase today. Every ingredient has a reason and a history, not just a "premium botanicals" label.

While I was building this, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement was unfolding across Iran.  It reframed what T Bazi could be: not just something to heal my skin, but a way to carry my culture forward on my own terms, and put Persian beauty, intelligence, and resilience at the center of a story too often reduced to conflict.

I healed by reclaiming what I used to shrink. I built T Bazi so you could too, not to fix you, but to hand you a ritual that actually works and a reason to trust what's in the bottle. Ancient wisdom, modern beauty. Your radiance was never something you had to earn. It was already yours.