With $2.9M In Funding, Vibrant Plastic-Free Mexican Makeup Brand Aora Expands To The US

Mexico City-based sustainable makeup brand Aora has raised $1.4 million, increasing its total pre-seed funding to $2.9 million and setting it up for expansion in the United States, where it’s entered via e-commerce in advance of launching at retail.

The brand intentionally secured a majority of its funding from Mexican investors, including prominent philanthropists, business owners, intellectuals, artists and designers such as art collector and historian Aimée Labarrere de Servitje and chef Elena Reygadas. Other backers are French actresses Joséphine de La Baume and Rebecca Dayan and British model Lady Mary Olivia Charteris Furze.

“It was always our plan from the beginning to bottle Mexico and present it to the world,” says founder Nour Tayara. “I want this brand to be an international brand. I want this brand to challenge the big players of the industry that it is possible to reduce our waste.”

Reaching a large swath of Spanish speakers in the United States is another goal for Aora, which incorporates Spanish on its packaging. Despite the trade war instigated by President Donald Trump against Mexico, Tayara sees plenty of signs that the moment is right for Aora to extend to the U.S., pointing out that there are three times the number of flights to Mexico from the U.S. as there were four years ago, 10 times the number of Mexican brands being trademarked for exports and Spanish songs have become smash hits globally.

“It’s a market of Latinos and Latinas that are ready and curious and hungry for a brand that also speaks their language in every sense of the term, whether it’s the culture, the actual language and the aesthetics,” says Tayara. “And that big market is completely underrepresented by brands, by retailers, by websites.” He adds, “It’s a fantastic moment for Mexico to shine in beauty, and there is a place for more and more voices in beauty that come from the south that are telling different stories.”

A proud queer Arab of Lebanese descent, Tayara, who worked at L’Oréal for 13 years, where his most recent role was SVP of marketing for Thayers Natural Remedies, moved from New York City to Mexico City in 2021. In December 2023, he launched Aora with Mexican business partner Rodrigo Penafiel. The brand’s assortment kicked off with the $65 eyeshadow palette Mírame, $27 solid lip serum Acaríciame in six shades and $22 eyeliner Admírame in five shades.

Aora’s products are completely free of plastic packaging. For instance, the packaging for its eyeshadow palette is 100% metal. Prior to Aora, Tayara learned about building a clean sustainable beauty brand at L’Oréal, where he was tasked to develop one during a stint in the sustainable technology department. While he got the brand to 90% plastic free over the course of a year, L’Oréal decided to scrap the entire endeavor. Tayara reports executives at the company told him, “A brand that is this optimistic needs an angry founder and L’Oréal cannot have angry leaders.”

At Aora, the plan is to triple the size of the assortment in the next year. Volumizing lip glosses, lip liners, primers, blushes and highlighters are in the product pipeline. Even as some sustainable beauty brands like Plus and LOLI Beauty have closed, Tayara is adamant about emphasizing the plastic-free aspect of Aora. The brand has partnered with waste and recovery organization RePurpose Global to be certified plastic negative and estimates that, for every product purchased from its website, it recovers nine times the equivalent amount due to its efforts with RePurpose Global.

“It’s a fantastic moment for Mexico to shine in beauty.”

“We owe the consumer a comeback to a pre-plastic world where makeup looked like an object, where you could have keepsake materials, where your vanity looked like a piece of art, not the kind of shelfies we are looking at these days,” says Tayara. “We are showering influencers with fridges full of plastic just so that we can get a post with eyeballs on it. We’re being irresponsible as an industry, and I think it’s important we start showing the positivity of new solutions happening.”

Aora is initially targeting boutiques in the U.S. for distribution and eventually is interested in major American retail. Tayara believes many of the selections at clean beauty retailers like Credo, The Detox Market and Goop are a tad boring today. He fashions Aora to be the opposite. Latin art is an important inspiration for it. Its secondary lip serum and palette packaging features Rosa Mexicano, a purplish pink tone that’s a cultural signature of Mexico. Blue inside the palette’s secondary packaging nods at Frida Kahlo’s La Casa Azul, the house she lived in that’s now a popular museum. The construction of the palette is a gesture to art deco shapes in Mexico.

Aora opened a store in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City simultaneously with its launch. Along with being a venue for selling the brand’s products, it’s a creative hub with a photo studio, office and space for makeup sessions, classes, concerts and yoga. Outside of the store, the brand landed at the high-end Mexican department store retailer El Palacio de Hierro last year and is carried by a handful of Mexican museums.

To spread the word about Aora, the brand has tapped makeup artists in Mexico City. Although it’s seeding influencers and other tastemakers, too, makeup artists are integral to its U.S. marketing strategy as well. Aora has teamed up with celebrity makeup artist and clean beauty advocate Katey Denno for education. The makeup artist Laramie used Aora for New York Fashion Week last month in the show for label Zankov’s fall 2025 ready-to-wear collection.

“We want to be able to tell our story as much as we can, whether it’s on shelf, whether it’s on podcasts, whether it’s online, whether it’s creators, whether it’s makeup artists,” says Tayara. “We have a story worth telling from a color point of view, from a cultural point of view and from a plastic-free point of view. So, the rest will come from that, but I think, if we achieve our goal of telling our story, people will listen.”

Aora expects to raise further funding to support its U.S. presence and amplify its message in a couple of months. “We are a small startup that also wants to grow, so we have some funding, but we need more,” says Tayara. “I have big ambitions for this brand.”