Sonela Beauty has officially completed its first orbit around the sun, and if you ask its founder what comes first, champagne or skincare, she doesn’t hesitate. “Skincare first,” she laughs. “Champagne is fun, but nothing feels better than a calm nervous system and skin that is genuinely glowing. That is the real celebration.” It’s a fitting philosophy for a brand that has become the quiet disruptor in a beauty landscape obsessed with trends and noise.
If she had to sum up year one as a lipstick shade, she’d call it Big Dreams: warm, confident, subtle until the light hits, and then suddenly, major. That energy carried her from kitchen-table formulations to her first beauty award, a moment she describes as “full body goosebumps,” seeing Sonela sitting beside legacy brands she once admired from afar.
But Sonela didn’t begin with accolades; it began with burnout. “Everyone in beauty was talking about ingredients,” she recalls, “but no one was talking about cortisol, even though stress was affecting my skin more than any product.” The realization hit during a period when she felt overstretched and undernourished, emotionally, physically, and dermally. “It finally clicked that beauty was having the wrong conversation. We needed a brand that understood the mind–skin connection.” The spark that became Sonela was less about cosmetics and more about reclaiming calm.
That ethos is exactly why the brand resonates. Sonela feels like a modern ritual wrapped in clean-girl confidence, makeup that doesn’t just look good, but feels good. “There was makeup that performed,” she says, “but where was the makeup that supported women through real life? The rushed mornings, the pressure, the cortisol spikes?” Her answer was a collection rooted in calm: serum-like textures, soft-focus finishes, breathable formulas, and zero synthetic fragrance. Or as she puts it, “mindful luminosity, the kind of glow that looks like you take incredible care of yourself.”
Her formulations read like a wellness lover’s dream pantry: hyaluronic acid, peptides, squalane, and Ayurvedic adaptogens like ashwagandha, turmeric, and Indian gooseberry. “If it doesn’t support stressed skin, it doesn’t go into our formulas,” she says. Gimmicks, shock-value ingredients, and heavily fragranced imposters? She’s “over them.”
The product people underestimate most? The liquid blush. “People think it’s just another blush,” she says, “and then they try it.” It melts into skin like second nature, delivering that signature Sonela glow that looks like it’s coming from within. Her DMs are filled with love notes: one customer calling herself “embarrassed for every gloss she used before,” another admitting she now feels “incomplete without the mascara.”
In an industry that rewards volume and virality, Sonela has chosen depth instead. “We found our voice by not chasing the noise,” she explains. “Instead of trends, we talked about stress, and people felt seen.” She’s more behind the lab coat than front-row selfie, obsessed with formulation, testing, and transparency. It’s why Sonela’s branding feels just as intimate as its textures. “Sonela reflects the stressed, overstretched version of me who needed support,” she says. “And the grounded, intentional, glowing woman I’m becoming.”
As she steps into year two, her mantra is simple: Expand the vision. Protect the mission. Keep the glow. Expansion, she notes, will be intentional, from the community to retail partnerships to product innovations. Skincare is a natural next step (“our makeup already behaves like skincare”), but the long-term dream is a full ecosystem: treatments, stress-supportive supplements, and eventually a grounding fragrance that “feels like calm in a bottle.”
Five years from now? She sees Sonela as “a global beauty empire with a soul,” championing cortisol-aware beauty on an international stage. And while she’s learned to say no to shiny opportunities that don’t align with her mission, she’s proud she took the risk of leading with stress. What seemed niche at launch has become the heart of the brand, and its most powerful point of connection.
Asked whose beauty bag she’d love to peek inside, she names Deepika Padukone, “minimal, luxurious, intentional”, and if Sonela had a celebrity muse, she sees Padma Lakshmi as its embodiment: global, sensual, rooted in ritual and wellness. And perhaps the most surprising revelation for a makeup founder: her current obsession is bare-skin days. “Brow gel and gloss and I’m happy,” she shrugs.
Sonela Beauty may be young, but it’s already reshaping what modern beauty looks like, less rush, more ritual; less pressure, more presence; less covering up, more glowing through. Or, as the founder puts it best: “Sonela Beauty is not just another brand, it is the moment you finally feel seen in your skin.”
