Raneen Awad Shares How Starting Her Career at 16 Shaped the Woman and Entrepreneur She Is Today

For Raneen Awad, success did not arrive through one lucky opportunity. Her career began at just 16 years old, when she entered the beauty industry as a Model Face and worked with several beauty salons.

Those early experiences gave her direct exposure to an industry that would later become central to both her public identity and business ambitions.

Today, Raneen is known as a social media influencer, content creator and entrepreneur, with 264,000 Instagram followers and her own skincare brand, RENO. The years between those two points helped shape the confidence, independence and standards she now brings to her work.

At 16, Raneen Awad had already entered a professional environment and started to understand the beauty industry through direct experience.

Her work with beauty salons introduced her to different sides of the sector at an early age, but she did not restrict herself to one role. Raneen later entered the piercing industry, developed her expertise and eventually became an instructor who taught girls through specialised courses.

Each stage gave her practical knowledge that she could carry into the next.

“I started to build myself at a very young age, and every experience taught me something that became useful later in my career,” Raneen says. “I understood early that if I wanted something of my own, I had to work for it and build my experience step by step.”

That sense of independence became an important part of Raneen's professional identity. Beauty, education, social media and entrepreneurship may appear to be different paths, but each one contributed to the career she has today.

Her growing presence on Instagram added another dimension. As Raneen developed an audience, she became recognised as a content creator and established a personal connection with followers interested in beauty and lifestyle content.

Social media gave her visibility, but she wanted to turn that influence into something with greater long-term potential.

Only a year after the start of her professional career, Raneen launched RENO Lips at 17. The lip-plumping gloss became her first product and marked the beginning of what would later develop into a much larger skincare business.

The response exceeded her expectations. RENO Lips attracted considerable attention, achieved high sales and prompted customers to ask for additional products.

“I did not expect RENO Lips to achieve the level of success that it did,” Raneen explains. “When customers started to ask for more products, I realised there was an opportunity to create something much bigger with RENO.”

That success also introduced a new challenge. Raneen was no longer responsible only for her own image and content. She now had customers who expected quality, consistency and products they could trust.

Over the following six years, RENO grew into a recognised skincare brand with thousands of products sold each year. RENO Skin Whitening Cream became one of its strongest products, while the company established production through skincare manufacturing facilities in Korea.

For Raneen, the experience reinforced one of the most important lessons she had learned since her teenage years: trust cannot be replaced by promotion.

“Product quality and customer trust are the foundation of a successful brand for me,” she says. “Marketing can introduce people to a product, but genuine trust comes when customers believe in its quality and want to return to the brand.”

That philosophy carries particular significance because Raneen built her career through social media. Her experience has shown her that visibility can create an opportunity, but a business still needs a strong product behind it.

Raneen Awad's ambitions now extend far beyond the market where her career began. Her goal is to make RENO available and recognised internationally, with expansion already underway.

The company has established a business in Dubai, UAE, while plans also include further promotion and distribution across the UAE and Turkey. RENO products have already reached customers in several countries, but Raneen sees this progress as another stage rather than the final destination.

“My ambition is to see RENO recognised around the world and available to customers in many different countries,” Raneen says. “Everything I learned since I was 16 has helped me reach this point, and I still have much more that I want to achieve.”

Her story remains closely connected to the age at which it began. Starting a career at 16 meant Raneen had to learn responsibility, customer relationships and professional discipline earlier than most. Launching a product at 17 then tested how far she could turn that experience into something of her own.

Today, those lessons continue to influence both the woman and entrepreneur behind RENO. Raneen's career has changed considerably since her first work in beauty salons, but the principle at the centre of it has remained consistent: build experience, protect customer trust and create something that can stand on its own quality.