Filipinta Beauty
A multimedia designer who built a beauty brand out of homesickness, turning Filipino childhood nostalgia into limited-edition cosmetics that sell out on the strength of one TikTok post.
Shop Filipinta BeautyFilipinta is what happens when you’re a trained packaging designer, 8,000 miles from home, and your hands won’t stop moving. Hana didn’t build a beauty brand — she built a time machine. Every product is a portal back to something Filipino: the sorbetes cart outside your elementary school, the babaylan in your lola’s stories, the rice cooker on every countertop.
The Founders
Hana Acabado-Kirchhoff
Co-Founder & Creative Director
Jasel Acabado
Co-Founder & Product Developer
Fast Facts
She Started It in Bed, Feeding Her Baby
In 2019, Hana Acabado-Kirchhoff was living in Rochester, New York, far from the Philippines she grew up in, caring for a newborn son, and spending eight to ten hours a day in bed. She was homesick in the way that only someone who has left everything familiar can be homesick — acutely, physically. So she did the only thing that made sense to a trained packaging designer: she started sketching.
Hana had studied multimedia arts at De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde in Manila before moving to the US in 2015. She had built a professional portfolio designing packaging for Anthropologie, Target, and Instax. She knew how to make beautiful objects. What she didn’t expect was that the most personal object she’d ever design would be an eyeshadow palette — or that it would resonate with millions of Filipino Americans who didn’t know they were waiting for exactly this.
“I started posting [my designs] online, and a lot of Filipino Americans started to really connect with it. I was like, wait a minute, why does this keep going viral? There’s that connection to the motherland. We miss it so much. [The response] kept inspiring me to advocate for the Philippines — it’s a wonderful culture.”
Hana Acabado-Kirchhoff, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Filipinta Beauty
The brand’s name says everything: “Filipinta” merges “Filipina” and “pinta”, the Tagalog word for face paint. Every product is rooted in a specific Filipino memory. The Sorbetes palette captures the ice cream carts of childhood, with shades named Ube, Queso, and Avocado. The Babaylan lipstick collection takes its cues from pre-colonial shamans, formulated for the full range of Filipino skin tones. There is a lip scrub that ships in miniature rice cooker packaging. There are candles shaped like halo-halo and siopao
Filipinta runs on a made-to-order model. Hana designs every package, packs every order, and ships every Friday from her home in Rochester. When she posts about Philippine history — courtship traditions, the babaylan, the culture her generation was encouraged to assimilate away from. The response is staggering. One post reached 3.9 million views. Filipino Americans raised to quietly set aside their heritage are finding their way back to it through a lip gloss the color of sukang iloko.
Why We Featured Them
What Makes Filipinta Beauty Different
01
The Package IS the Product
Hana is a professional packaging designer whose clients included Anthropologie, Target, and Instax. At Filipinta, the packaging is not marketing — it is the art. Every product ships as a small act of cultural celebration, designed by the same hands that pack and send it.
02
Made to Order, Made with Care
Filipinta runs on a made-to-order model. Hana packs every order herself, ships every Friday, and includes insurance on every shipment. It’s the opposite of mass production.
03
A Platform, Not Just a Product
When Hana posts about Philippine courtship traditions or pre-colonial babaylan history, she’s not doing it for the algorithm. The brand has become an unexpected classroom for Filipino Americans rediscovering who they are.
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Each collection is limited — when it's gone, it's gone.