How This Founder Built Colourette With the Filipino Beauty Community in Mind

“Happy ka with it?” asked Colourette founder Nina Ellaine Dizon, just a few days after she’d drenched her entire face with water on TikTok live for the launch of Bake Base, the brand’s take on setting powders. Before we could get far into our interview, I shared that I brought my own Bake Base with me, and Dizon at first felt more keen on learning what I thought of the powder—the variant, my makeup routine, my commute route, among other chikas.

My own list of questions could wait.

Miss Nina—as her followers call her—is one of the most celebrated founders in F-beauty, and has narrated the story of her beginnings “over a million times,” as she tells with a laugh. Colourette began in the city of Pampanga years before it became the community-centered beauty brand today. “I was studying nursing then,” she recalls. It was a practical choice, and not something she wanted to do. However, her mother, who was working overseas at the time, suddenly told her that money for the next semester’s tuition had run out. “Sabi niya, ‘Nina, stop ka muna.’”

She faced the predicament matter-of-factly. “I was like, okay, sure. I’ll just chill. I’ll find something to make money out of. Ganon ako eh, I like selling things, entering into new ventures.” A businesswoman at heart, Dizon then started selling self-formulated soaps and lotions in her garage-turned-office in Pampanga. This eventually led to Fairness and Flawless, her online skin care business that helped her earn enough to return to college and, this time, take up accountancy (a second degree program she’d soon figure out wasn’t for her either). The brand’s name, she’s quick to clarify, is one she no longer stands by: “I don’t stand by those two words anymore, but [the products] were enough to send me back to school.” 

Like a trickle to a storm, the simple business venture eventually demanded more of Dizon than she had anticipated. It was a one-man team, she describes: she developed the products, photographed them, sourced manufacturers, answered inquiries, packed lotions into smaller containers, brought parcels to couriers, the list goes on—all alone. As her resellers multiplied in numbers, her hours of sleep dwindled. “I didn’t have time for myself anymore,” she recalls.

With orders piling up and school becoming harder to keep up with, Dizon found herself weighing the two against each other: she could either return to college again (third time’s the charm!) and finish a degree in marketing management, or give the business a chance while it is still growing. 

“If it fails, I can always go back to college,” she told herself. “But if I started college first, I feel like my business was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” 

It’s easy to look back with the luxury of hindsight. But for Dizon, committing fully to the business was, then, a high-stakes gamble—one that only time and experience would reveal was merely the first of the many difficult yet rewarding choices, with Fairness and Flawless evolving to the homegrown brand Colourette as we know it today. Now, at 33 years old, Dizon’s sacrifices seem to have paid off, leaving her with a celebrated, homegrown beauty empire built with her own two hands.

Kim Santos

The many hats Nina Dizon wears

Being a beauty founder is just one of her many job titles. She’s also a product developer, marketing strategist, and self-described multifaceted “TikTokerist” in a previous interview with Allure Philippines. On her TikTok account, whether she’s on a four-day trip to China hunting down the right packaging for her products, in Europe documenting her first foray into perfumery, or back home teasing the brand’s latest product in development, Dizon has, in a way, narrowed the distance between Colourette and its community, which she calls the Peaches. 

It’s safe to say that the Colourette community is never too far from Dizon’s mind. Getting to know them, she says, is always central to the brand. “Talagang I interview [my community], I sit down with them. I talk to them, I ask, how many kids do you have? Sa budget mo, how much do you allocate to makeup? Or when you wear makeup, what’s important to you? Is it performance? Is it coverage? Is it longevity?”

Dizon also shares that lately, she has also taken to riding Angkas, the motorcycle-hailing app, using the motortaxi commute to put Colourette’s products to the test. Getting to know consumers’ routines, she explains, makes her a better product developer and a better communicator for the brand. It also means she can speak from experience.

“Kasi sabihin na, oh, nag-develop ka naman ng product pero all day ka naman nasa airport. Excuse me! Not me,” she says with a laugh.

Dizon even shared a shade matching matrix for her audience by buying full-size foundations from other local brands—a little competitor analysis, if you will—to see how those shades would compare to those of the now cult-classic First Base skin tint. It was Colourette’s first base product, with 24 shades designed to account for the range of Filipino complexions.

The more she learns about the people buying her products, the more products she can make with their lifestyles in mind. It’s a principle she hopes Colourette won’t outgrow, even as the company gets bigger. “If I know our consumers and I know how they operate in their lives and I know what’s important to them, then I can create products that are intentionally for them,” she says. “Kasi when we started, we were a community brand—I had no choice. I had to get to know our customers.”

Having started with little, Dizon learned early on to find creative means to make ends meet. It’s a knack that stayed true to her, even as Colourette reached far and beyond. Take the latest launch of Baked Base, for example. Dizon wanted to prove its hydrophobic properties, so she studied the percentage of the hydrophobic ingredients. She watched videos of other creators conducting similar tests, set up dual cameras, and told her team, “Guys. I need to see ourselves wet.”

All that creativity, as Dizon mentions, includes “‘Yung pagtatagpi-tagpi ng mga bagay na ‘yon, from how we created the product to how we sold it.” 

Kim Santos

Colourette, Nina, & Colourette and Nina

However, the question of where Colourette ends and Nina begins is one she’s still working through. 

There is a natural arc to building something from scratch, pouring every ounce of your energy and stamina into it, and hoping that one day the machine will finally run on its own. For years, Dizon was that sole engine as she broke glass ceilings, talked to thousands of people, and widened her social network as a self-admitted introvert.

“Honestly, it’s so hard for me to differentiate myself from Colourette.” She lets the thought linger in the air for a while. “Because for the past 10 years, I would say that my work was my life.”

The drive came at a price, and on the hamster wheel of building an empire, parts of herself had to step aside. “I had to forget a lot of aspects of my being, and that’s the sacrifice that I had to make as I gave Colourette my everything to be the brand it is today. I don’t regret it, but yeah.”

Dizon describes herself as agentic—someone who believes she can make things work because she has done it before. That relentlessness served her well as a founder, but it also made it harder to recognize when the problem was not something she could solve simply by working more.

She had, by then, tethered her entire sense of self-worth to Colourette: the brand’s public perception, metrics of a product drop, product launches, reviews, and the hum of validation from customers and followers. When burnout set in, she found herself questioning whether she still wanted to keep going. 

“That’s when I realized that you will burn out if you make your life center your work, because my value during the time was so ingrained in my achievement.”

She notes how turning to therapy helped her work through the question. “I realized, I wasn’t looking at my real life, my kids, my hobbies, my personal dreams, sans the work,” she says. “And that’s why I got burnt out.”

She adds, “To everyone else, I’m Miss Nina. But at the end of the day, I’m just Nina.” 

It took time, and a willingness to look beyond work, to get there. As Colourette matured, Dizon began to see that taking the brand further would mean trusting other people to do what she once had to do herself. “I needed more capable people in my team who are smarter than me, who are better than me to bring it to the next level—and I already have all of these skillful, smart people in my team who will help me propel Colourette forward.”

Dizon wants to give credit where it’s due. There is, of course, a team behind the Nina Dizon people see online. Colourette remains a small operation, with everyone working hands-on toward the same goal, and it’s only this year that the brand acquired an office they can call their own. Dizon thinks this is part of the brand’s magic: the people building it are just as invested in seeing it grow.

Kim Santos

How Colourette grew from a garage to a BGC office

Now, looking at Colourette’s first proper office in BGC, she sees how far the business has come. “I think I did something right,” she says. “Nilaban ko ‘to from literally nothing to something.”

She’s quick to qualify that this isn’t the end of the road, but there’s a recognizable distance between where she started and where she is now, particularly when she thinks about the advantages she has today. “I started not knowing anyone in the industry, I did not know a single person who could mentor me.”

It was a double-edged sword to do it all alone. Without anyone to turn to for advice, she had to learn by doing, but also bear the brunt of the risk. “If may gusto akong gawin, parang malaman ko kung tama o mali yun, kailangan gawin ko siya. Doon ko malalaman.” 

There was no way to know for sure without trying—and no small cost to getting it wrong. “The mistakes were very expensive, and it’s even more expensive when you don’t have money. When you don’t have safety nets.” And looking back, she sees a strong woman behind those risks. “Ang tapang ko noon.”

What’s next for Nina Dizon? 

But what does it mean to run a Filipino beauty brand, beyond cosmetics? Dizon has learned to look beyond the usual markers. “We always diminish beauty as what we see externally—na oh, makinis ba siya, maputi ba siya, sexy ba siya,” she says.

With a decade under her belt, Dizon says beauty now comes down to the impact you leave on people. It’s how a customer sees herself wearing a Colourette product, what she takes away from hearing Dizon’s advocacies, or what the brand makes possible for the people who work for her. Dizon thinks of her daughter, too, and the things she hopes to impart about self-esteem. “It’s no longer the physical attributes or the external things,” she says. “Bonus na lang yun.”

Colourette will still be Colourette. “We’ll be doing more, better, more innovative, more intentional product innovations for our community because I’m getting to know them more.” Nothing less is expected of the brand with humble beginnings—from a makeshift garage in Pampanga to a full office in the heart of Bonifacio Global City. 

And as we wrap up the interview, I ask: What’s next for Nina Ellaine Dizon? 

For someone who has been working for most of her adult life, the idea of becoming an athlete may sound like another commitment to fit into an already-full life. Perhaps, at first, it will be. Yet this time, the work is not about what she pours out, but what she finally allows back in.

“I’ve never been an athlete. I’ve always loved swimming, but back in elementary, wala kaming pera. Ngayon, may pera na ko, sabi ko, I have freedom, I can do whatever I want. I wanna be an athlete! [I want to] train like an athlete—hyrox, swimming, maybe a pickleball tournament.”

If there’s anything the past ten years has taught us, it’s that Dizon is an ambitious woman. And whatever she sets her mind to do, she will. 

Kim Santos