Heart Evangelista has spent 27 years as the Philippines’ reigning cultural icon, from teen television sensation to Paris Fashion Week fixture. Now, at 40, she’s orchestrating her most audacious transformation yet, evolving from celebrity to astute businesswoman. Her latest venture, a skincare empire built deliberately without her famous name, reveals a counterintuitive truth about lasting influence: sometimes the most sophisticated move is building something bigger than yourself.
It’s late afternoon in Manila when a WhatsApp voice note pings into my inbox. Heart Evangelista is halfway through engagements. Packing for yet another international flight, she’s multitasking with the fluency of someone who’s spent most of her life accustomed to a public spotlight.
“I didn’t want it to be anything that had Heart in it, or my name in it. I didn’t want it to have a shelf life,” she’s explaining. Evangelista is referring to Luxelle, the skincare line she launched under the Pure Living consortium in July 2025, being distributed across Southeast Asian markets without a trace of its founder on the packaging.
The world knows Heart Evangelista as many things: the Philippines’ undisputed style icon, the actress who’s graced screens for decades, the artist and painter of Birkin bags, or the muse who commands front rows from Milan to Paris. What they don’t know is the gifted businesswoman who’s been quietly building an empire designed to outlast her fame. This isn’t the Heart Evangelista of magazine covers and red carpets, it’s the strategist who’s spent years studying how influence really works, and what happens when the cameras finally stop rolling.
Born Love Marie Payawal Ongpauco on Valentine’s Day 1985, Evangelista navigated childhood between California and Manila, the youngest daughter of restaurateur Reynaldo Ongpauco, whose family constructed the Barrio Fiesta restaurant empire, and Maria Cecilia Payawal. At just 13, she was discovered in a shopping centre and absorbed into the entertainment machinery. By the early 2000s, she was appearing in ABS-CBN dramas, later transitioning into film, accumulated early honours including “Best New Female TV Personality” at the Star Awards, and positioned herself as both screen and print media fixture.
This visibility, however, came with invisible strings. “Growing up in the industry, you were just as good as the last film you had, or the ratings of your show,” she recalls. “You lived in a box where you can only do this or that.” At home, the boundaries proved equally restrictive. “I followed every action,” she opens up. “I never really truly had the freedom, but once I did, I embraced it. I was liberated, and now I’m very expressive with what I do and what I wear.”
Those constraints, rather than limiting her, became her education in the mechanics of influence. She learned early that recognition functions as both currency and cage, and that attention can be leveraged but never entirely controlled. It was a masterclass in the volatility of visibility, lessons that would prove invaluable decades later when she began constructing businesses.
Today at 40, she reflects on that paradox not with resentment, but with the clarity of someone who’s transformed limitation into strategy. “Before, I was in so much need of appreciation. But as I’ve matured and turned 40, I’ve realised that it wasn’t bad at all that I wanted people to like me. It just probably says how much of a heart a person has when you overthink things.” Reinvention, she explains, meant “attending funerals of different versions of yourself”—a gradual shedding of personas until what remained approached something more sustainable than stardom, authentic influence with commercial application.
The Heart Effect
That transformation took shape not in Manila but in Paris. In 2017, Evangelista attended Fashion Week for the first time, taking seats at Schiaparelli and Giambattista Valli. By 2019, she had secured front-row positions at Chanel, Dior, and Elie Saab. In 2024, she crossed another threshold, opening a runway show for Vietnamese designer Phan Huy. What appeared to be a glamorous evolution was actually market research in disguise, Evangelista was studying how cultural capital converts into commercial power, and how presence translates into purchasing influence.
“I love that Southeast Asia has been booming, especially for me from the Philippines, I see more artists coming,” she observes. “There’s a whole world to explore. There’s a whole world of people who don’t know you, who will not judge you.” For her, Fashion Week represented not simply glamour but insertion into a cultural economy where presence itself could recalibrate perception and, crucially, purchasing behaviour.
This positioning crystallised into what has since been termed the “Heart Effect”—a phenomenon where markets respond not to manufactured scarcity but to authentic engagement. “I feel like you can’t really program people by saying, ‘let’s make this a trend!’ No, I feel like it has to be organic. It has to be natural,” she maintains. “It’s like an exercise that our fans or people that view me go through. They say, ‘Oh, I can do that too, or I can do this.’ In essence, that is the Heart Effect, but it’s their way of making it their own.”
The data substantiates her instinct. At Paris Haute Couture Week in 2025, Launchmetrics positioned her as the top celebrity, generating $3.8 million in Media Impact Value, surpassing Blackpink’s Jennie and Jisoo. At Milan Fashion Week later that year, she claimed the summit again with $8.7 million MIV. Between 2020 and 2023, she ranked fourth globally in fashion and sportswear at $85 million MIV, fronting over 50 campaigns. These aren’t vanity metrics: brands have directly credited her with measurable sales increases tied to her endorsements.
“When you touch something, when you say you don’t like it, it really, truly means you don’t like it. And when you say you love it, they really know that you love it. I feel like that’s really the key to success, because the more authentic you are, the more believable you will be,” she explains.
“The moment you embrace yourself, it translates into real buying power,” she continues. “It’s never just about likes or views. People connect more deeply when they see the flaws as well as the polish. It’s about how you move the market.”
The market has indeed responded. Her portfolio spans Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, Cartier, Hermès, and Lancaster alongside Luxe Organix, Metrobank, Purefoods, and Poten-Cee. To observers, the range might appear contradictory. To Evangelista, it represents sophisticated market understanding, and the ability to maintain credibility across segments simultaneously. For example, she’ll often pair runway pieces with accessible items, rendering both selections inevitable. “There can be a dime a dozen of that single boot, but how you wear it makes it yours.”
Evangelista shares that her relationship with fashion carries deliberate intention. She appreciates trends whilst refusing subjugation to them. Years in heels, she laughs, have made flats treacherous terrain. “It’s not by following trends. Just wear what you want, and people will really feel it.” When this sensibility travels, markets interpret it exactly as she intends, validation that authenticity converts into commercial power.
“At the end of the day, it’s not about numbers. It’s not about whether you rank first or not. What matters is the influence you have on a niche or a community of people,” she reflects. Conversion over spectacle. Purchasing power over vanity statistics. Everything else constitutes background noise.
Beyond the Spotlight
It’s this very philosophy that has fused her love of culture with her instinct for business. With Fornasetti, she contributed artwork to a homeware collection that tessellated golden hearts into Lina Cavalieri’s iconic visage. With Indonesian brand Voneworld, she co-created the Love Bag series featuring her original illustrations. In Boracay, she maintains ownership stakes in Harlan Beach Resort. Through Pure Living Wellness, co-founded with her sister in 2021, she developed Luxelle whilst insisting from inception that the brand’s success couldn’t depend on her image.
“I’m very conscious about keeping my business separate from my public persona. Even if the two overlap, they don’t come from the same basket,” she asserts. “That distinction has a lot to do with how I think about longevity, and how I imagine my later years.” Where most celebrities construct empires tethered to their personas, Evangelista is deliberately creating enterprises designed to survive succession, attract independent investment, and endure beyond her own spotlight. “It will not evolve around me,” she states emphatically about Luxelle.
The decision represents more than a commercial play, it’s the culmination of decades spent observing how celebrity functions as an economic force. Evangelista has witnessed careers that peaked with visibility and others that sustained through substance. Her choice reflects hard-won wisdom about the difference between the two.
It’s also one of the reasons her philanthropy, though considerable, remains largely unspoken. In 2008, Evangelista established Heart Can Foundation supporting children with respiratory conditions. Since 2024, she has served as President of the Senate Spouses Foundation, assisting vulnerable communities from orphans to the elderly. Almost none appears online. “At an early point, my dad and mom would always instill in me that you’re blessed to be a blessing. I don’t think we should work hard and take all the glory and not do anything to give back. Probably 90% of what I do to give back isn’t on Instagram, and I think that’s important, because at the end of the day, I feel like our likes and points in Heaven are far more important than the acknowledgement here on Earth,” she reflects. “I truly believe that the more that you give, the more that you will receive. We’re not in this world just for us or for our loved ones. I feel like we’re here to become an instrument.”
Her advocacy for mental health awareness represents another dimension of this same social outreach. Speaking to Vogue Singapore in 2021, she revealed her own struggles with anxiety and depression, describing how “the perfect life” that Evangelista projected to her fans and followers, the media, and her family, turned on her in the most unexpected of ways. The revelation—that someone so seemingly composed could struggle internally—resonated powerfully with audiences. Yet rather than treating this as a singular moment of vulnerability, she’s consistently used her platform to normalise conversations about mental wellness.
“It was like a miracle. I was like, ‘oh my god, there are so many who are suffering in silence, because they don’t know why or are embarrassed to seek help’. This is something that can be fixed, you just need to take the first step,” she told Vogue Singapore at the time.
During our conversation, she explains how she now reframes anxiety as a component of her business thinking. “Anxiety can be bad, but I try not to think about it as something that would be crippling,” Evangelista admits. “It has kept me grounded. It has made me project a trajectory of my life, of what could be and what shouldn’t be,” sharing she rehearses contingencies so that neither catastrophe nor triumph will destabilise her foundation. “With so much of the spotlight on you, you do have a responsibility at the end of the day.”
For most artists and celebrities, the source of their deepest anxiety isn’t the work itself but the shadow it casts: legacy, longevity, relevance. The fear of fading, of slipping from cultural memory, drives entire careers. When I press Evangelista on that—on the pressure of remaining an icon, of when she might pivot into legacy mode—she answers in a way that makes it clear that fear has never been hers. She’s undeterred in that her strategy doesn’t cling to visibility. Her focus is to embed her relevance by extending her mindset and talents into things that exist far beyond the brand of Heart Evangelista itself. Beyond the screen, beyond the magazine spread, beyond the red carpet or the boardroom, she wants to build something that continues through her, but not dependent on her.
“I’ve been doing this for 27 years now, playing different roles, in different situations. What I’ve learned is how malleable I am. Every reinvention has taught me to bend without breaking.”
Icon, mogul, strategist, or muse—you can call her by any name. What matters is Heart Evangelista isn’t chasing the spotlight, she’s playing the long game.