Hispanic Heritage Month officially wraps today, but for the founders behind these brands, heritage was never a 30-day theme. It’s the formula. It’s in the Dominican hair rituals Cardi B now bottles for Grow-Good Beauty, the Costa Rican curandera traditions that shaped Adriana Ayales’s Anima Mundi and the hometown that gave OCOA, the first Dominican-founded hair-care brand at Ulta Beauty, its name. Here, nine Latinx founders share how their roots shaped what they built, plus the one product each is proudest of, and the reason it belongs in your routine long after October.
Cardi B, Grow-Good Beauty
Grow-Good started with Cardi B’s own push for healthy hair after years of feeling like it simply wasn’t possible for her. The fix, she found, wasn’t a miracle product but repetition. “My hair care is all about having a routine and being consistent, so I wanted to create Grow-Good Beauty with that same idea,” she says. That meant building the line around the masks and deep treatments she actually uses.
“Dominican traditions and rituals are a really big part of who I am,” she says. “I’ve been passing these traditions down to my own kids and now being able to bring them into Grow-Good and share them with the world means a lot to me.”
Her pick is the Get Rich Hydrating Mask ($20), inspired by the Dominican DIY masks fans have watched her use for years. “It’s sold out three times, which is just so crazy to me,” she says.
Carolyn Aronson, It’s a 10 Haircare
Before she was running a hair-care empire sold in more than 140 countries, Carolyn Aronson spent more than 20 years as a hairstylist in Michigan, watching clients layer product after product. “I founded It’s A 10 Haircare out of frustration with brands that offered countless products with single benefits and confusing claims,” she says.
Her story starts earlier than the salon. Aronson grew up in foster care before being adopted, an experience she credits with teaching her resilience and the value of individuality. The brand’s first formula was created for her daughter, who is of mixed race, after Aronson struggled to find products that properly nourished and protected her hair. “My heritage fuels my passion for multi-functional beauty, driving me to create a line that prioritizes simplicity, effectiveness and inclusivity,” she says.
Her pick is the one that started it all: the Miracle Leave-In ($22), which packs 10 benefits into one bottle and still sells once every three seconds. “It was my Hail Mary,” she says, “and ultimately became the foundation for everything we’ve built since.”
Julissa Prado, Rizos Curls
Julissa Prado spent years straightening her hair, and when she finally wore her curls naturally, nothing on the shelf worked. Performance was only half the problem. “I wanted effective, high-quality formulas that made my curls feel healthy and beautiful, but I also wanted to see people who looked like me represented by the brands I was buying from,” she says.
That gap became Rizos Curls, a brand built around curls, community and culture. “In our culture, hair is so personal. It can carry memories, traditions and even generations of ideas about what is considered ‘beautiful,’” Prado says. “For me, learning to embrace my curls was also about embracing a part of myself that I had spent years trying to change.”
Her pick is the Gloss + Repair Mask ($30), designed to give curls a mirror-like shine without compromising texture while repairing damage and smoothing frizz. “It represents how much Rizos Curls has grown and how we continue to innovate specifically for our community,” she says.
Nicol Varona Cancelmo and Cory Varona-Corniel, OCOA
OCOA began with two Dominican sisters unlearning the idea of pelo malo, or “bad hair.” “Growing up, we constantly felt forced to straighten our hair to fit beauty standards that weren’t made for us,” says cofounder Nicol Varona Cancelmo. When they embraced their natural texture, they found the prestige aisle had almost nothing clean or curl-specific made for them, so they built it: lightweight, scalp-first formulas without heavy buildup or coconut oil.
The island is in every detail. The brand is named after San José de Ocoa, their mother’s hometown, which means “a place between mountains” in the indigenous Taíno language. The formulas lean on the natural remedios they grew up with, like mango butter, hibiscus, ginger root and coffee seed, and the packaging is fully bilingual. “In the Dominican Republic, beauty is bold, vibrant, joyful and deeply connected to nature and family,” Varona Cancelmo says.
Their pick is the 4-Step Travel Kit ($28), which took nearly two years to launch. It was, she says, “the number-one most-requested product by our community.”
Michael Dueñas, AROVE
As a curly-hair specialist, celebrity hairstylist and groomer Michael Dueñas learned early that water on set curls is a no-go, which made him notice that almost every product he used listed water first. “Why sell bottles of water with a touch of beneficial ingredients when you can make and sell beneficial ingredients with no water!?” he says. The answer was AROVE, a waterless line he cofounded and self-funded through thousands of formula iterations.
His drive traces back to his family. His father left Cuba at 13, stowed away on a cargo plane with melted jewelry as his money, and died when Dueñas was two year old. His mother worked full time and still made sure he looked put together every day. “That’s where my view of beauty comes from,” he says. “It’s care, and it’s pride in how you show up.” He compares the brand to his favorite dish, ropa vieja: “You take something old and make it new and better.”
His pick is the AERIOUS Conditioner ($36), a powder formula he says was “so incredibly hard to make” because he refused to rely on silicones, fillers or clay. “Every ingredient has a benefit,” he says.
Adriana Ayales, Anima Mundi
Adriana Ayales grew up in Costa Rica, “where going to the curandera was as practical as going to the doctor,” and spent 15 years learning from master herbalists and healers across Central America. When she moved to New York, she found a wellness world hungry for healing but cut off from where the plants came from. Anima Mundi, which means “world soul,” was her answer.
Her formulating starts where curanderismo does. “The first question isn’t ‘What are your symptoms?’ It’s ‘What has gone out of harmony?’” she says. That means thinking about the whole person, sourcing wild-harvested and small-farm botanicals and working directly with growers. “Every herb carries a lineage,” she says.
Her pick is Euphoria ($50), a mood-boosting blend she formulated years ago from mostly rainforest herbs, including Latin American plants like damiana, catuaba and cacao.
Sandra Lilia Velasquez, Nopalera
Sandra Lilia Velasquez calls the idea for Nopalera “a divine download.” Standing in her parents’ driveway, looking at a cactus, she wondered why no one had built a beauty brand around the nopal. “It’s more versatile than aloe vera, it carries centuries of symbolism, and it is the ultimate symbol of resilience,” she says. That question became the foundation for a brand built around an ingredient deeply rooted in Mexican culture.
For Velasquez, Nopalera is also about challenging the idea that luxury has to come from Western Europe. The product names are in Spanish, inspired by places and scent memories from Mexico, while the nopal itself reflects the resilience of the community she represents. “I created Nopalera to position Mexican culture as premium on the global beauty stage,” she says. “Heritage isn’t our aesthetic. It’s our foundation.”
Her pick is the Dulce de Cuerpo Eau de Parfum ($78), a fragrance inspired by the ceremonial scent of copal. Velasquez worked closely with her fragrance house to capture the real thing, burning copal with the team and sending samples to the lab. When the fragrance launched at Ulta Mexico, customers told her it smelled like Mexico. “That’s everything,” she says.
Shan Berries and Erika Clark, Shades By Shan
Shades By Shan started with a familiar frustration: products that looked beautiful online but fell short in real life. “I was constantly buying products that looked beautiful online, only to find that the shade, formula or quality didn’t live up to what I was looking for,” Berries says. She and Clark launched the brand in 2018, also founding The Mamaberries Foundation to support single parents. A portion of every purchase goes toward its work, which has helped more than 200 families. “Her resilience is at the heart of everything we do,” Clark says.
Growing up, the founders understood there was no single Latina skin tone, and they wanted their products to reflect that diversity. “Our products are for everybody,” Berries says. For Clark, inclusivity also means considering “who gets a seat at the table, who gets an opportunity or whose stories are heard.”
Their pick is The Foundation ($42), a 40-shade formula developed in Korea with a 10-molecule hyaluronic acid complex and rosa canina oil. The team tested it on women across a range of skin tones to refine the formula and shades. According to the brand, it is the first 40-shade foundation from a Latina-owned indie brand at a major retailer and its best-selling foundation at JCPenney.
Yris Palmer, siiiba
The brand siiiba started with a problem Yris Palmer noticed while raising her daughter, Ayla, who often went straight from school to sports. Palmer realized kids needed more guidance around hygiene and, after talking with other moms, saw an opportunity for clean, age-appropriate personal-care products.
As a Latina and first-generation American, Palmer says family, hard work and community shape everything she builds. She also wants young girls who look like her daughter to see themselves as future founders. “I want my daughter and other young girls who look like us to see that we can create our own opportunities, build brands and take up space in industries where we may not have always seen ourselves represented,” she says.
Her pick is siiiba’s debut Natural Deodorant ($15), created to make that first step into personal care feel positive. “I wanted her first introduction to personal care to feel clean, safe and empowering—not like something she needed to be embarrassed about,” Palmer says.
