I’ve been struggling to write this.
Not because I don’t have words—I have too many, and most of them are angry. About the state of things. About the noise coming out of the halls that are supposed to represent us. About the poverty that has always been there, now somehow louder and more devastating against the backdrop of spectacle and corruption we are all being forced to watch.
And then there’s my job. Which is to tell you about a bouncy new blush. A miracle serum. The best new sunscreen of the season. I am aware of how that sounds right now.
Beauty has always been, at its core, a non-essential. Makeup, skincare, that hair oil you’ve been meaning to try—as objects, as purchases, none of it is essential. None of it fixes anything. And I say this as someone who has built her work on the belief that beauty matters—that it is worthy of serious attention, real conversation, genuine craft. Of course, I still believe that. But this is harder to hold when you are also raging.
The truth is, beauty is only beautiful when it can exist easily within a life. When it is a small, ordinary pleasure layered over stability… over dignity, over enough. When it isn’t a question of choosing between a jar of moisturizer and something more urgent. For so many Filipinos right now, that ease doesn’t exist.
“The truth is, beauty is only beautiful when it can exist easily within a life. When it is a small, ordinary pleasure layered over stability… over dignity, over enough.” —Nicole Morales
But here is the thing I keep coming back to: Beauty is also an industry. A real one with real people inside it. The beauty advisor on the mall floor who has hit her quota three months running and is now watching foot traffic slow. The makeup artist who built her clientele from nothing, booking by booking, and is now feeling the dread of a calendar that used to be full. The founder who spent years formulating something she believed in—sourcing local, building slow, trying to do it right—now watching consumer sentiment retreat toward survival mode. The brand managers, the content teams, the logistics people, the packers. This industry is not just products on a shelf. It is paychecks. It is rent. It is someone’s kid’s tuition.
Beauty brands, all of them operating in this market, are navigating an economy unsettled by chaos they did not create, competing for the attention and the pesos of a public that is exhausted and, frankly, furious. Consumer confidence doesn’t collapse selectively. When people are stretched thin—financially, emotionally, politically—discretionary spending is the first thing to go. Beauty feels that early. And the entire industry, from the global names down to the smallest local launch, absorbs the impact.
So the industry keeps moving. New launches still happen. Reviews still get written. We are still here, doing this. Is that resilience? Or is it denial? Maybe it’s both. Maybe continuing is the only honest response to chaos not because it solves anything, but because stopping doesn’t either. The sales associates still has bills to pay. The founders still need to sell. The work still needs to be done.
Carrying on with the work doesn’t mean we can’t say this out loud: the conditions that make beauty feel light and joyful and worth talking about are not equally available to everyone. That there are Filipinos for whom beauty is not a beautiful flatlay or a glossy GRWM—it is out of reach, period. And that the same failures of governance, the same corruption, the same hollow spectacle we are all watching right now, are precisely what keeps it that way.
Where does beauty fit in a moment like this?
Maybe it fits exactly here. Not as escape, not as denial—but as something we choose to protect. The ability to care for yourself, to take pleasure in small things, to show up to your life with intention—that is not trivial. It is, in fact, one of the things worth fighting for. The chaos wants us depleted. Beauty, at its best, refuses that.
