Homegrown Healing
In this issue’s Homegrown Heroes, we take a look at five Filipino wellness brands and spaces who aren’t waiting for permission to change the system. They’re addressing lack of access and inequality by creating what should have always existed.
The word hero doesn’t land easily here.
Maybe because we’ve seen it misused, shaped by textbooks, softened by politics, and stripped of complexity. Or maybe because we’ve learned, quietly and early, that to be a “hero” in the Philippines often means to endure. To keep going. To give more. Even when you shouldn’t have to. Even when you can’t.
But what if we stopped romanticizing that kind of survival? What if we redefined a hero, not as someone who walks through fire, but someone who builds a world where no one has to? What if wellness wasn’t just a luxury or aesthetic, but a form of resistance: an insistence on care, access, and equity in a system that rarely offers any of it freely?
Maybe strength isn’t always stoic. Maybe it’s the choice to rest. To speak. To protect your peace. To feed your body. To unlearn shame and ask for help. To create space for softness, curiosity, safety, because in a culture that often demands silence and sacrifice, those acts are transformative. That’s where real growth begins.
Shaira Luna
Take Mood Food founder Liz Uy, for example, who built her name in fashion, shaping silhouettes, headlines, and aspiration itself. But instead of staying in the engine room of influence, she moved toward something quieter and closer to her truth as a mother: snacks that nourish, designed not around image, but around access.
Shaira Luna
That same instinct of turning what we consume into something more intentional drives Rosalina Tan and Mary Jane Tan-Ong. In a category often led by imported labels and foreign claims, Pili Ani insists that beauty and innovation can be native, and that what grows here is not only enough. It’s exceptional.
Shaira Luna
Elsewhere, change begins not with product, but with practice. In Brazilian jiu-jitsu, black belts are called professors, and professor Mark Entrata of Alliance Jiu-Jitsu Manila isn’t fighting toxic masculinity with hot takes or hashtags. He’s doing it on the mat—through discipline, structure, and a philosophy that teaches strength without aggression, vulnerability without fear. He’s training women to trust their bodies, and men to unlearn the reflexes that mistake power for dominance. What he’s building isn’t just self-defense. It’s a new kind of safety.
Shaira Luna
That spirit of unlearning runs through Ava and Isabelle Daza’s work, too. Radical change is here, and the sisters are doing it loud: They’re refusing to let shame raise another generation. Their brand Jellytime doesn’t just sell condoms and lubricants, it confronts centuries of silence around consent, desire, and agency. In a country where sex is often taught through fear or not at all, they are giving women the vocabulary—and the tools—to take control of their own pleasure and protection.
Shaira Luna
And then there’s MindNation’s Cat Triviño, whose story reflects what so many have been taught to believe: that success requires self-sacrifice. She once trusted the hustle, until it left her empty. Today, she’s helping to build the kind of mental health infrastructure she once struggled to find, making support not a privilege, but a right, and reminding others that calling for help and choosing rest, too, is strength.
None of them call themselves heroes. They don’t have to. They’re too busy doing the work. Sometimes in silence, sometimes in the shadow of outdated expectations, often with all their own stunts.
But what they share is a commitment to staying here. Rooting here. Fixing what they can. Naming what we don’t talk about. And building what we were never handed. These people are changing the world by confronting the one we’ve quietly accepted for too long.
And maybe that’s what makes a homegrown hero: not someone who waits to be rescued, but someone who reaches for the broken pieces and says, “this isn’t enough”. We can do better. We will. Even if we have to build it from scratch.
Makeup and grooming: Lala Flores (Isabelle Daza, Rosalina Tan, Cat Triviño) and Emman Magpantay (Mark Entrata, Mary Jane Tan-Ong, Liz Uy). Hair: Cats del Rosario (Isabelle Daza, Rosalina Tan, Cat Triviño) and JA Feliciano (Mark Entrata, Mary Jane Tan-Ong, Liz Uy). Styling: Joy Bernardo and Jolo Bayoneta of StyLIZed Studio. Nail artist: Hey Poly Nail Studio (Isabelle Daza and Liz Uy)
Photographer’s assistant: Emelito Lansangan. Makeup artists’ assistants: Marc Magpantay and Nicolas Magpantay. Hairstylist’s assistant: Jeremi Cabarrios. Stylists’ assistants: Girlie Atun, Ayi Custodio, Stephanie Satorre.
