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Beauty Brands Worth Knowing About This AAPI Heritage Month 🪷

25 items

Current Crush

Beauty brands founded by AAPI entrepreneurs that go beyond the usual K-beauty suspects — haircare, skincare, makeup and fragrance across a whole range of Asian and Pacific Islander backgrounds.

Sections

Fragrance

Skincare & Cosmetics

Hair and Accessories

Fragrance

AAPI-founded fragrances that are actually worth the hype, from honey-infused hair scents to the gourmand layering blends everyone's been obsessed with.

Divya Gugnani developed a sensitivity to fragrance after an autoimmune diagnosis, so she made her own clean fragrance line mood-boosting scents that won't irritate your skin.

5 SENS

Chinese-American founder Bee Shapiro was a New York Times beauty columnist who got pregnant, couldn't find a clean fragrance she loved, and just made her own. Now it's one of the best clean fragrance lines going.

Ellis Brooklyn Fragrance

Iraqi-American Mona Kattan built this around the Middle Eastern tradition of layering scents. If you've never tried layering fragrances, start here. Vanilla 28 and Pistachio Gelato are the ones everyone's obsessed with.

KAYALI

Skincare & Cosmetics

Some seriously good skincare and makeup brands, from K-beauty inspired formulas to clinical-grade serums that actually work.

First-gen Indian-American Rooshy Roy grew up holding onto her grandmother's Ayurvedic beauty rituals and eventually turned them into a skincare and haircare brand rooted in ancient Indian ingredients.

AAVRANI

A Korean brand that basically started inside dermatology clinics — their ceramide-packed moisturizers and barrier repair products are a go-to for sensitive skin.

AESTURA

Basma Hameed survived third-degree burns as an infant and spent decades mastering color on real skin — the result is an inclusive, skin-like makeup line that actually delivers.

BASMA Foundation

Korean founder Mihwa Kim discovered the power of hydrogel patches while recovering from a car accident, and turned that into one of the most viral K-beauty skincare lines around — their collagen masks basically sell themselves.

Biodance | Sephora

Sisters Taran and Bunny grew up struggling with acne and sensitive skin, tried everything, and eventually just made their own line — Blume is now a go-to for clean skin, body, and period care.

BLUME

Anishinaabe founder Jenn Harper literally had a dream about Indigenous girls covered in lip gloss and woke up knowing she had to start a beauty brand. Cheekbone makes clean, sustainable color cosmetics with representation at the core.

Cheekbone Beauty

A Japanese luxury skincare and makeup line that's been around since 1982 and has become a cult favorite among beauty insiders for its seriously good formulas built around decades of skin cell science research.

Clé de Peau Beauté

Filipino-American co-founder Giselle Go moved to Tokyo, fell in love with Japanese beauty rituals, and noticed a gap in clean, simple skincare there. DAMDAM partners with a 400-year-old sake maker to ferment rice for their formulas — the attention to...

DAMDAM

Co-founders Charlotte Palermino and Filipino cosmetic chemist Joyce de Lemos met and started asking hard questions about what ingredients actually do — Dieux is the result, a skincare brand built on radical transparency and science-backed formulas.

Dieux

Taiwanese-American Alice and French-Ivorian Marie met at Google and started EADEM when they couldn't find clinical-grade skincare that actually worked for them. Their Le Chouchou lip balm has also gone seriously viral — the cooling metal applicator a...

EADEM

Malaysian-born founder Kimberley Ho left Goldman Sachs after seeing how little innovation was actually going into family skincare. Clean, dermatologist-developed products for the whole family, from babies to teens to moms

Evereden

Dutch-Iranian founder Negin Mirsalehi grew up in a family with six generations of beekeeping, and her mom was already mixing their honey into homemade hair treatments. Gisou is basically that family recipe turned into a brand.

Gisou

Thai-American founder Ann McFerran immigrated to the US at 7 and grew up relying on lashes to feel confident. She got fed up with messy glue and built Glamnetic from her apartment — magnetic lashes that actually work.

Glamnetic

Korean-American co-founders Sarah and Christine met at L'Oréal, bonded over K-beauty, and quit their jobs to bring those innovations stateside. Their fruit-forward skincare is some of the best stuff at Sephora.

Glow Recipe Clean Skincare ra

A Korean brand built around the clean, natural ingredients of Jeju Island. One of the most beloved eco-conscious K-beauty brands out there, especially known for its green tea and volcanic clay products.

Innisfree

Korean founder Dino Ha built this with Sephora to bring the fun, cute side of K-beauty to the US. The packaging alone will make you want everything and the formulas actually deliver.

Kaja

Founder Sheena Yaitanes is an organic chemist who got tired of clean makeup that never looked right. Started on her kitchen table and the concealer and tinted face oil basically took over everyone's routine.

Kosas Clean Beauty

Indian founder Priyanka Ganjoo launched this as the first South Asian-owned brand at Sephora, inspired by the kajal and bold colors she grew up with. The brow gel keeps selling out for a reason and the kajal is so good.

Kulfi Beauty | Sephora

Hair and Accessories

Some really good hair and accessories finds, from biotech damage repair to the cute clips you'll see everywhere.

Tiffany Ju could never find cute claw clips, so she started making her own — and now Chunks is one of the most recognizable hair accessory brands around, known for their playful, quirky designs.

Chunks

Korean-American founder Julianne Goldmark started this at 14 because her school uniform left no room for self-expression except through her hair. What began as hand-dyed elastics in her kitchen turned into one of the most covetable hair accessories b...

Emi Jay

Indian British siblings Akash and Nikita grew up watching their grandmother oil their hair and tell them stories, and eventually turned those childhood rituals into a haircare line. The first South Asian brand to launch at Sephora and honestly the pr...

Fable & Mane

Indian-American co-founder Suveen Sahib came from tech, got obsessed with hair biology, and basically cracked the code on damage repair. If your hair is fried from color or heat, the leave-in mask is the one.

K18 Biomimetic Hairscience