Familiar face on beauty billboards of Dubai

Irish visitors to Dubai may be surprised to see a familiar face – everywhere. Moate woman Isobel O’Neill is featured on billboards, lampposts, digital screens and in stores across Dubai, her face and thick wavy hair looking out across the city.

Isobel works for the internationally hair and beauty company Sephora in their head office in the Middle East and was selected to be their Hair Campaign model this month.

“It’s an unbelievable and surreal experience, and I don’t think it has fully sunk in yet,” Isobel confessed in an interview with the Westmeath Examiner this week.

“My dissertation in college was on Sephora, the world’s biggest beauty retailer. Any time I travelled to a country with a Sephora, I made sure to visit,” Isobel recalled. Now, eight years later, she is now working for Sephora Middle East.

“If you’d told me back in college that I’d be working for Sephora, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she said.

Isobel moved to Dubai a year and a half ago, initially on her own while her fiancé Andrew McCormack, Rosemount and intercounty football star, stayed in Ireland to finish his GAA season.

Andy is now playing with a team in Dubai called Jumeirah Gaels and their first tournament of the year was last weekend. Andy’s brother David, another Westmeath and Rosemount star, who has just moved to Saudi Arabia, travelled with his wife Caitlin to play in the tournament, which featured all teams from the Middle East.

“We’ve now both been here over a year, settling in more each month. It’s a fast-paced place to live but we’re both in dream jobs and enjoying the lifestyle,” Isobel said. “Dubai has already given us incredible opportunities – even ones I never could have imagined, like seeing my face on a billboard,” she laughed.

“We love the heat and that Dubai is so well connected – not too far from home, and easy to travel to Ireland, Europe, and destinations like the Maldives, where we got engaged,” she added.

They were home earlier this year to celebrate their engagement with family and friends and are looking forward to planning their wedding.

Isobel’s mother, Jacqueline, helped her move out to Dubai and she and Isobel’s sister Ella both visited last year. The three of them visited Dubai 18 years ago. “It was very different to now. I remember seeing the Burj Khalifa being built and mam telling us that it was going to be the tallest building in the world. Now I drive by it on my way to work every day,” Isobel said.

She video calls her mother and her grandmother, Kathy Fahy, née Cuffe from Ballymore, every day, sometimes twice a day. “I talk to them more now than when I lived in Dublin,” Isobel chuckled. She is close to her granny, who “has always been there for me, along with Mam”.

She and Ella are also close and talk most days, mainly about clothes and makeup, Isobel laughs. “I miss them all lots, it’s the hard part about living away from home.”

Isobel’s passion for makeup started at 15, after watching YouTube tutorials – “I loved how creative I could be”. At 16, she started working in a local pharmacy after a short TY placement. Working on the makeup counter led her to doing makeup applications and eventually masterclasses.

“I always knew I wanted to be a buyer. My cousin Amy in the UK was a buyer in fine jewellery, and I wanted to follow in her footsteps – though I didn’t realise it was possible to do it in beauty,” she said.

In sixth year at Moate Community College, Isobel went to the DIT open day to explore courses for buying. She was advised to study Retail and Services Management, and completed a four-year degree course.

In college, Isobel focused every project possible on the beauty industry and also did her college internship in a beauty distribution company. After graduating, she got work experience in beauty buying with “Ireland’s biggest retailer”. That opportunity turned into a career, and she worked there for nearly six years in beauty buying, before moving to Dubai.

“Sephora has always been the dream and one I never thought possible. I’m so grateful to be working there and now having my face on one of Sephora’s marketing campaigns. A dream come true!,” Isobel concluded.