Noha Younes: When Architecture Found Its Way into Jewelry—and the Microphone

An architect who carried a designer’s eye from Alexandria to the UAE and then Canada, Noha Younes refused to reduce herself to a single profession. Between architecture, jewelry design, her Karezma brand and radio, she built a path not by erasing what came before, but by making room for something new whenever another passion emerged.

There is a question that sounds simple until a person has lived more than one professional life:

What do you do?

For Noha Younes, there is no single answer.

She is an architect, a jewelry designer and the founder of Karezma, as well as a media personality whose experience has developed across several countries.

Architecture, jewelry and radio may appear to belong to entirely different worlds. Look closer, however, and one thread connects them all: the desire to take an idea and turn it into something another person can see, touch or hear.

That is what makes her story a natural fit for Tawasul News’ “Immigrant Women Outside the Box” series.

Not because she abandoned one profession in search of another, but because she never accepted the idea that her first professional choice had to be her last.

It began with architecture

Younes studied architecture at Alexandria University, a natural direction for someone who had long been drawn to drawing, design and detail.

For her, architecture was never simply about buildings or technical plans. It brought together art, precision, responsibility and the ability to transform an idea on paper into a physical environment that could influence people’s daily lives.

After graduation, she began working as an architect before moving to the United Arab Emirates, where her career developed over many years.

Her responsibilities expanded from architectural design to managing teams and projects, and her professional experience included work related to the design and development of schools and nurseries at the Ministry of Education in Dubai.

Those years gave her discipline, attention to detail, time management and professional structure.

But another part of her creativity was still looking for somewhere to go.

2020: When design changed form

Then came 2020.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the rhythm of everyday life and work around the world. For Younes, it also created space for a question that had perhaps been waiting quietly in the background:

What do I genuinely love doing?

The answer was still design.

But this time, there was no building waiting to be drawn.

There was a piece of jewelry.

Younes began studying jewelry design and handmade crafts, learning more about materials, techniques, natural stones and gemstones.

She started sketching her own pieces and supervising their production through a small workshop in Alexandria.

At first, the designs were limited and circulated mainly among friends and acquaintances. Encouragement from those around her gradually pushed the idea beyond a personal creative outlet.

That was how Karezma began.

For Younes, the name reflects more than appearance. It represents personality, presence and individuality — precisely what she wanted her designs to carry.

What remained of the architect?

Quite a lot.

Moving into jewelry did not mean leaving architecture behind.

The architect remained present in her sense of proportion, her attention to detail, her planning and her ability to visualize an object before it exists.

Younes uses copper in some of her designs, with silver or 24-karat gold plating, alongside natural stones and gemstones.

But the material itself is only part of the story.

What matters to her is that a piece should not simply reproduce something already widely available.

Her interest in natural stones led her to study their history, cultural symbolism and uses across different civilizations. Over time, she began collecting distinctive stones from different places, sometimes allowing the stone itself to become the starting point for a new design.

The idea behind Karezma is that a piece should have a personality of its own — much like the woman who chooses to wear it.

Jewelry first — then a collaborative art project in handbags

Although jewelry design remains the core of Karezma, Younes’ creative curiosity did not stop there.

The project later expanded into a collection of natural-leather handbags, but this part of the story also carries an important element of artistic collaboration.

The handbags were a joint project between Noha Younes and artist Sherine El-Laboudy, who is responsible for hand-painting the designs on the bags.

Through that collaboration, leather becomes a canvas carrying faces, colours, symbols and individually rendered details.

The idea was therefore not simply to add another product to Karezma. It brought together the direction and creative concept of the project with the hand and artistic technique of a painter responsible for executing the artwork.

The collaboration began in Dubai years ago, and Younes is now introducing the first collection of these pieces in Canada.

Some of the designs are produced only once, preserving the individual character of handmade work rather than turning each concept into a series of identical copies.

And in telling that part of the Karezma story, the distinction matters:

Younes stands behind Karezma and its creative direction, while the hand-painted artwork on the handbags is the work of artist Sherine El-Laboudy.

Then came the microphone

Design, however, was not Younes’ only longstanding interest.

She had also been drawn to writing, conversation and communicating with people, an interest that led to an early online radio experience in Egypt with Radio Hekayatna, where she presented a program called “Karezma.”

The experience introduced her to preparing programs, organizing ideas and speaking to an audience in an accessible way.

Her relationship with media continued in the UAE through radio appearances in which she discussed jewelry design, materials, natural stones and the creative process behind transforming raw materials into finished pieces.

After moving to Canada, she returned to the microphone again.

She participated with Hawa Radio Vancouver and later had other media experiences, including Rogers TV and Chain Radio.

In that sense, what began with a pencil and an idea eventually became something she could also communicate through voice.

Canada: A new beginning that did not erase the past

Moving to Canada placed Younes in a situation familiar to many immigrants.

Years of professional experience and established responsibilities in one country do not necessarily mean life will resume at the same point in another.

The market changes.

The culture changes.

Professional and personal networks often have to be built again.

But Younes decided not to select one part of herself and leave everything else behind.

She brought her architectural experience.

She brought Karezma.

And she brought her interest in media.

In Canada, she continued developing her designs and presenting her jewelry to Arab communities and a wider audience, while retaining Egyptian and Arab influences in some of her work without treating heritage as a fixed formula.

This is where immigration becomes central to her story.

Immigrants do not only carry with them what they have already done. Sometimes a new beginning gives them the opportunity to discover what else they are capable of doing.

Outside the box of the job title

We are accustomed to success stories that follow a straight line:

Education. Job. Promotion. A more senior position.

Younes’ path did not remain that linear.

She studied architecture, worked in the profession and progressed professionally. But she did not allow that success to close the door on the jewelry designer she later discovered.

Nor did building a creative project require her to silence the part of herself that wanted to speak into a microphone.

To her, these paths do not compete.

Architecture gave her precision and planning.

Jewelry gave her space for visual expression and for creating something that carries her own design language.

Radio gave her space for words and communication.

That is why asking whether she is an architect, a designer or a broadcaster may be the wrong question.

She does not have to choose one in order to invalidate the others.

The point is not to abandon what you started

Perhaps this is the most important part of her story.

Younes’ experience is not an argument that everyone should leave a career in pursuit of “passion,” nor that every hobby must become a business.

It suggests something far more practical.

People change.

A new interest that appears years into a career does not mean the years before it was a mistake.

Sometimes we do not need to demolish the life we have already built.

We simply need to add another door to it.

From Alexandria to the UAE and then Canada, Noha Younes did not simply move between three countries.

She moved between different ways of expressing herself.

An architect who turns lines into buildings.

A designer who turns ideas into jewelry.

And a broadcaster who turns thoughts into words that reach other people.

At no point did the arrival of a new version of herself require the disappearance of the one before it.

Perhaps Noha Younes’ story is not really about moving from architecture to jewelry and radio. It is about a person’s right not to spend an entire lifetime giving only one answer to the question: “What do you do?”