Dominique Cojuangco Hearn has spent the better part of her adult life building around how people actually live. The Collective, Sorto, motherhood—it all comes back to the same belief: that knowing yourself is where everything else begins.
It’s lunchtime, and we’re already packing up, fresh from our May cover shoot. The racks of clothes are being pushed aside and the team is settling in for lunch with a well-earned ease. This isn’t the first time Dominique Cojuangco Hearn is doing a shoot for Lifestyle Asia: she graced a cover back in 2022, having just launched her multi-brand beauty platform The Collective with a wedding on the horizon.
At the close of that previous profile, she shared: “It’s really about being intentional with how I spend my time, which is really how Michael [her then fiancé] and I plan our days as well, but really making sure that we spend quality time not just with each other but with the people that we love.”
She was 27 then. She hadn’t yet walked down the aisle, and The Collective was still finding its shape. Since then, life has opened into something fuller: a marriage, a daughter, a brand that has grown into itself, and a new business just beginning.
More on that later.
For now, the shoot has wrapped up, the team is gathering, and someone has brought out a box of cupcakes. Tomorrow is her birthday. She waits for the singing and cheers to subside before she leans forward and pauses just for a moment (to think of her wish, of course; we don’t ask what it is, of course), before she blows out the candles.
31 tomorrow. The cupcakes are passed around. The girl we met at 27 has been busy.
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Lessons Dominique Cojuanco Hearn Learned From Her 20s
Your values will shift. Who you are at 29 won’t always reflect who you were at 20. It’s a sign of growth, wrote Dominique on another birthday last April. It was a simple list of lessons from her twenties, which she posted on Instagram. She captioned it simply: “As we close a chapter.”
These were honest lessons in the way only things written for yourself tend to be. Slow down. You don’t need to fill every moment. Rest is productive. And further down the list: Speak to yourself like someone you love. Your inner voice matters more than you think.
What’s interesting, in conversation with Dominique now, is how evident her steady build toward this has been. Growth not as reinvention, but as attention, the kind that requires knowing yourself a little more clearly with each passing year.
That idea informed her first business, The Collective, a brand built on the belief that people deserve to feel empowered by their skincare routines, rather than diminished by them. It also informs her latest venture, Sorto: an AI-powered wardrobe app two years in the making and only just launched. Around that same time two years ago, her daughter Penelope was born; nothing has clarified this sense of selfhood more. Motherhood holds a mirror up—you see yourself the way your child will one day see you.
“Motherhood pushed me to want to be the best version of myself I could be, so I can show up fully for my daughter. It gave me a different kind of motivation,” she says. “I think about the example I’m setting for Penelope. I want her to be able to look back and see me striving to do things that genuinely interest me, and to feel encouraged to do the same.”
The Foundation
By the time Penelope arrived, the example was already well underway.
Dominique studied fashion design at the Istituto Marangoni in London before moving into merchandising and marketing at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in San Francisco.
“I started in design, which gave me a strong foundation in construction, proportion, and development,” she says. “Over time, I realised I was more interested in how products exist in the real world. How they are positioned, experienced, and chosen.” This instinct was further sharpened during her time on the e-commerce team at Benefit Cosmetics’ San Francisco headquarters.
“Working in beauty in the US, and then looking at how products were being marketed locally [back then], made the contrast very clear to me,” she continues. “There was a strong focus on whitening and acne, often rooted in insecurity rather than self-empowerment. That gap stayed with me.”
It eventually became something she wanted to change. Together with Michael Hearn, then her fiancé and now her husband, she built The Collective as a direct response to that gap. It was a platform where considered skincare could find a home, and where people could feel included in their own routines rather than being sold a version of themselves they didn’t recognize.
Over the years, the multi-brand platform began pointing her inward. “[The Collective] has become more focused,” she says. “What started as a platform has evolved into a brand with its own point of view, products, and direction. That clarity has made everything feel more aligned.”
Read the full story in our May 2026 e-magazine by subscribing to Lifestyle Asia’s digital access or purchasing your copy at Readly.
Photography by Belg Belgica Assisted by Hallvard Cano
Creative Director Paolo Torio
Stylist Roko Arceo
Make-up Zidjian Paul Floro Assisted by Jhazz Villanueva
Hair Kurt Andrei Rosales
Shot on location at Twenty Third by Deanne, Makati
