In 2004, a young Filipina stepped off a plane in Dubai with no salon, no brand, and no plan beyond seeing the world. She waited tables. She worked a retail counter. She took whatever came. Two decades later, Lea Casas Brena runs her own beauty company — and still talks about that first stretch of odd jobs like it was the best decision she ever made.
“I was young and wanted to see the world,” she says. “Dubai seemed like the natural place to visit and work, even then.”
Today she runs Lea Health & Beauty, a venture grown entirely out of her own fascination with hair, fashion, and the simple idea that everyone deserves to feel good about themselves.
From the salon floor to her own brand
What started as an interest became an enterprise. Back home in Liliw, Laguna, she keeps a beauty salon, and over the years she has developed and sold a line of products drawn from the region around it — Lipute wine, Lipute jams, and honey sourced from the forests of Mount Banahaw. Lea Health & Beauty became the natural outgrowth of all of it.
The work suits her because it isn’t really about products at all. “I sincerely believe every single person is beautiful and deserves the support and confidence building that professional services and products can provide,” she says. “My customers are my friends, it’s as simple as that.”
There is a lightness to how she talks about it. She lights up over small inventions — the LHB chocolate, for one — that exist mainly to make someone smile. “I love designing and making products that put a smile on people’s face and they enjoy. I really have fun!”
The pull of the community
Ask her what keeps her abroad after all these years and she doesn’t mention money or weather. She talks about people. “I love bonding with my kababayan and sharing the ups and downs of life abroad,” she says. “Life just seems more intense.”
She speaks to her family in the Philippines every day, but the expatriate community in Dubai has become its own kind of home. That bond has carried her through the hard stretches every long-term OFW knows — financial crises, COVID, family worries, and now the unease of war in the wider region.
“You deal with these things through the ongoing support of family and friends, as simple as that sounds,” she reflects.
Keeping her head up
Her optimism has a source she quotes readily: Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. “Positivity is a way of thinking and happiness is a lifestyle,” she offers. “He’s an eternal optimist. So am I.”
That outlook shapes the advice she gives fellow Filipinos finding their footing abroad. Problems are guaranteed, she says, but isolation isn’t required. Lean on your church, your family, your friends. “We are all in this together.”
Whatever comes next, she knows where she wants to put her energy — into the Filipino community in Dubai that gave her a second home.
