Eugenics is the field that gave us the English term “improving the race” and the Spanish term “mejorar la raza”. So where did the widespread eugenic language of taḥsīn al-nasal or “improving the offspring” – popularly used to discriminate in marriage against the darker-skinned – come from in Egypt? There exists little published scholarship on the influence of eugenics on social policies in Arabic-speaking countries such as Egypt. This may be due to the same issues which were faced in the 1990s by researchers of eugenics in Latin America. First, a historical social reluctance to see race in non-north American contexts, and second, only seeing eugenics as “negative” state intervention into reproduction via “hard” methods such as sterilization in the United States and Germany. But in Catholic-dominated Latin America - much as with Muslim-dominated Turkey and Iran in the Middle East - such active interventions were frowned upon as irreligious, and eugenic social control manifested itself through family planning policies and national identity control. Looking for the history of eugenics in Egypt and how it shaped the idea of “improving the offspring” is therefore a question of re-reading social policies previously assumed to be non-eugenic and non-racialized. This paper traces how contemporary Egyptian concepts of race have been influenced by international eugenics theory from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. If eugenics in Egypt was a nation-state reproductive project aimed at producing the ideal healthy Egyptian through family planning, and if the ideal Egyptian was visually imagined in a particular racial way informed by older Egyptian histories of race and new global ideas of race, then “taḥsīn al-nasal” inevitably became a eugenic attempt of "racial improvement".