It’s Hispanic Heritage Month—spanning from September 15 to October 15—to truly celebrate this month, we need to support Hispanic and Latinx-owned businesses and voices. Designers use this season to showcase their personal cultural heritage and heritage via apparel, jewellery, accessories, and home items.
“We are seeing a rise of Latinx beauty entrepreneurs because they do not see themselves represented, so they are taking matters into their own hands,”
says Margarita Arriagada, founder of Valdé Beauty
Although there is still much work to be done, Latinx-founded hair, makeup, and skin-care brands are gaining traction and helping to revitalize the sector.
In the spirit of celebrating Hispanic Heritage month and Latinx beauty with changing power in the industry, here are 7 Latinx-founded firms you can support:
1. Nue
Stephanie Montes, a former fashion and beauty editor, a plus-size, designed a range of breast tape that lets women feel confident and comfortable in low necklines and backless dresses. Nue was born out of Montes’s desire to support and celebrate women of all sizes, colors, and body types. It is sustainable, waterproof, sweatproof, outfit-proof, hypoallergenic, and latex-free and comes in dark, light, and medium tones.
2. Rizos Curls
Rizos Curls was founded by Mexican-American Julissa Prado, who grew up in Los Angeles and was motivated to create a line of clean hair products by her own challenges with curly hair. The line features a variety of nourishing ingredients, such as reparative aloe vera and strengthening moringa oil, and is designed to work with a wide variety of curl textures and patterns.
Gabriela Hernandez, a cosmetics historian who came to the United States from Argentina when she was 12 years old, launched Bésame Cosmetics in 2004. The company makes vintage-inspired makeup with modern ingredients. Inspired by her grandmother, the range has become a modern vintage staple because of its long-lasting lipsticks, rouges, and beautiful vintage packaging.
4. Ere Perez
Despite the fact that Ere Perez’s namesake natural cosmetics and the skin-care brand was created on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, the idea for the company originated in Ere’s native Mexico, where her grandfather was a medical doctor and her mother was often making up natural, at-home treatments. Her products, such as the beetroot cheek and lip tint and the calming multiuse papaya marmalade balm, both provide the perfect flushed look.
5. GSTQ
GSTQ was founded and is owned by first-generation Cuban American Dany Garcia, who aims to strike the ideal balance between elegant power dressing and elevated athletics with her capsule collections. Garcia stated in a statement, “GSTQ, inspired by my mindset, was born out of a desire to build something I couldn’t find: clothing for a community of multi-hyphenate women.”
6. FARM Rio
FARM Rio is a Brazilian fashion and lifestyle company that has been around for over 20 years and is known for its brightly colored dresses, blouses, shirts, and more. The brand is one of the most popular fashion labels in the United States and Brazil because it draws heavily on the country’s rich cultural heritage.
In addition to being a carbon-neutral business, FARM Rio also places a premium on sustainability by planting a tree for every item purchased.
República Skin conveys the narrative of its creator, Julissa Bermudez, by conserving and promoting clean beauty and adhering to the company’s founding premise that clean body care can be sensuous, inclusive, and derived solely from the earth. The brand’s first product is a sugar body polish that took two years to develop and uses only natural ingredients from the Dominican Republic.
Body polish that leaves an exhilarating, radiant glow is the product of a collaboration between Bermudez and a lab in California. The ingredients, which include squalane derived from sugarcane, coconut oil, and moringa oil, are all formulated specifically for the product.
