For Marlou “MC” Colina, beauty was never going to be just about the glow.
The Texas-based Filipino founder of MC Skin Care and MC Aesthetics has built his work around the more difficult side of aesthetics: the recurring skin and hair concerns that people often spend years trying to manage. Among them are melasma (dark patches usually triggered by sun exposure, heat or hormones), hyperpigmentation (areas that turn darker than the surrounding skin), acne, uneven skin tone, psoriasis, eczema, keratosis and hair thinning — conditions that affect not only appearance, but often confidence as well.
Speaking to Lifestyle media, Colina made clear that MC Aesthetics was created not for mass-market beauty, but to address specific and stubborn concerns, “especially melasma,” he emphasized.
The focus is rooted in personal experience. Colina spoke openly about his own struggles with acne in high school and the bullying that came with it — an experience that pushed him toward skin care long before he had a company to run or a system to grow.
Years later, while living and working in Texas as an aesthetic nurse, he found himself increasingly drawn to one especially frustrating concern.
“As we age, one of the most difficult conditions to treat is melasma,” he said. “So that became very challenging, and in 2013, I started looking for a combination of treatments.”
He recalled trying different approaches, including chemical peels and other protocols, only to see the same pattern repeat itself: improvement, then recurrence.
That recurring cycle, he explained, pushed him to think beyond procedures alone. “Laser is a technical way to exfoliate, but it does not control the pigmentation,” Colina said. “You need something that will control it when the patient goes home after a treatment.”
For Colina, that is where MC Aesthetics comes in. It is a complete range of skincare and medicated creams that is not a one-time beauty fix but part of a longer-term approach to managing inflammation and pigmentation.
In his video presentation, he described the system as combining ingredients such as glycolic acid, vitamin C, glutathione, azelaic acid, niacinamide, alpha-arbutin and tranexamic acid, along with exfoliating components like salicylic acid and vitamin A, all intended to help address exfoliation and pigment control more strategically.
Colina also traced the growth of MC Aesthetics to the pandemic years, when business slowed but he was still able to travel and bring the products directly to different markets. What began as an effort to educate people about the line soon evolved into what he called “collective education roundtables,” which he held in different US cities.
The response surprised him. “Nine out of 10 clients needed the product,” he recalled of one early gathering, adding that similar demand in other cities eventually helped open doors in New York, Florida, California and even Madrid.
From there, his work expanded from product use into practitioner education. He said he began speaking at medical conventions after realizing that many clinics and med spas were facing the same treatment frustrations.
“A lot of med spas had the same experience I did,” he said. “They were really having a hard time treating these conditions.” More than anything, that seems to have clarified his purpose: not just to sell a product, but to share treatment protocols with professionals looking for better answers.
If anything, Marlou Colina’s work appears to be coming full circle. What began with his own struggles with difficult skin conditions has grown into something he now hopes to share with more practitioners willing to take on the same challenges.