Why the Highest Paid Stars in the Philippines Don’t Look Filipino

Añadido: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]I want to show you something. Here are some of the highest earning entertainers in the Philippines. These are actors and singers, TV hosts, and models. The people whose faces are on every billboard, every commercial across 7,000 islands. Now, look at their backgrounds.

[00:00:17]Four of them have a direct foreign parent. And Curtis, her father was Australian. Her mother's a Filipina, but she was born in Australia. Or Bea Alonzo, her father is British, her mother is Filipina. Or take Marian Rivera, her father is Spanish and she was born in Madrid. Liza Soberano, her mother is American and her father is Filipino and she's like me, born in California. Then you've got another group whose families have significant European or Chinese heritage going back generations. Sharon Cuneta, she comes from Spanish-Filipino mestiza lineage.

[00:00:53]Or Heart Evangelista, she's Filipina-Chinese.

[00:00:57]Or take Piolo Pascual, his father was a full-blooded German named Harald Herzik.

[00:01:03]Next up, we have Aga Muhlach, Spanish, German, and Chinese roots traced back to a great-grandfather who emigrated from Europe. So, so far, that's eight names.

[00:01:12]And then let's look at the ones who are unambiguously full Filipino. You got Kathryn Bernardo, Vice Ganda, and Dingdong Dantes. Now, the Bureau of Internal Revenue actually publishes who pays the most taxes among celebrities each year. In 2022, Kathryn Bernardo was the number one celebrity taxpayer. The full list included Coco Martin and Curtis, Liza Soberano, Sarah Geronimo, Vic Sotto, and Willie Revillame. So, look at that list.

[00:01:43]When you trace the backgrounds, the pattern still doesn't go away. It actually gets stronger. So, today I want to talk about why. Not to blame anybody or not to say any of these celebrities don't deserve their success. They clearly do. The question is about the system that decides which faces the Philippines market rewards the most. And that didn't start in a casting office.

[00:02:07]It started about 400 years ago. But before I get into the history, let me tell you what made me notice this in the first place. I have Filipino friends, some guys that I know and hang out with, and I noticed that when the topic of beautiful women come up, they would always gravitate towards the lighter-skinned Filipinas. It's what's here called the mestiza look, the mixed features. And when I'd say that I thought that morena Filipinos were just as beautiful, those that have, you know, tanner skin, darker complexions, they'd always kind of look at me, you know, like, all right, foreigner, like, of course, a foreigner always thinks that.

[00:02:47]Or as if finding a brown-skinned Filipina was some kind of exotic preference that only a Westerner would have, in their own country, about their own Filipinas. And that's when it hit me. This isn't just about celebrity, this is about something that runs so deep that Filipino guy friends have been taught to see their country's most common features as less desirable. And the foreigner is the weird one for not agreeing. So, a few years ago, that's really when these thoughts started kind of circling around in my mind and when I started to look at the data. So, when Spain colonized the Philippines in the 1500s, they brought with them a racial classification system. It was called the casta system and it was written into colonial law. At the top, peninsulares, full-blooded Spaniards born in Spain.

[00:03:39]And then below them were insulares, people that were from pure Spanish descent but born in the Philippines.

[00:03:47]Same blood but still lower status just because they were born on Philippine soil instead of soil in Spain. Below them were the mestizo de español, mixed Spanish and native Filipino. And then all the way down this hierarchy at the bottom was indio, which is the indigenous Malay population or the actual Filipinos. This system determined where you could live and what jobs you could hold or even how much tax you would pay and whether you could enter certain parts of the city. Manila at this time was racially segregated.

[00:04:21]Spaniards and mestizos lived inside the walled city of Intramuros. Indios lived outside. And there were a separate category for Chinese Filipinos, mestizo de sangley. And listen, guys, I know my pronunciation isn't the best, so forgive me. I know some of you will tell me in the comments what I'm mispronouncing and I appreciate it, kind of. So, the mestizo de sangley, they had their own set of restrictions and their own path to economic power. For over 300 years, the system taught an entire population that lighter skin meant closer to power.

[00:04:57]That mixed features meant higher status.

[00:05:00]That looking European meant looking important. And the thing that's a bit sad is that even after Spain left, the hierarchy didn't. It just got absorbed into Filipino culture. The families who had mestizo status under the Spanish kept their economic and social advantages. Those advantages compounded over generations. And some of the celebrity families on that list I just showed you are the direct descendants of that colonial class structure. And I want to say one other thing as well.

[00:05:30]Because before I was giving Filipino guys a bit of a hard time, but I've certainly also heard Filipinas that maybe are a bit lighter skin or maybe have a bit more status that have talked about those dark-skinned Filipinas. So, these kinds of things isn't just a beauty standard, but it's still to this day. I'm not saying with all Filipinos, but it's still something that definitely lingers not only with Filipinos but with Filipinas. All right, let's hop back into this history of colonization cuz I know what you're thinking. Yeah, buddy, it's easy for you, the American, to talk about the Spaniards, but what about you Americans and you guys also being colonizers in the Philippines? Well, all right, here we go. So, after the Spaniards, then came the Americans in 1898. And they replaced one colonial standard with another. The Spanish brought the racial hierarchy and the Americans brought, well, let's say Hollywood. English and American magazines and American beauty standards.

[00:06:36]A communication studies professor named Beverly Romero Natividad documented this in her research. She found that Filipinos were continuously taught to look up to white images. These were basically light-skinned Hollywood celebrities. And over decades, through films and media and advertising, the colonial template got so deeply absorbed into the culture that it stopped feeling like something that was imposed. It just started feeling like it was how things were. And this is where it starts to get into the economics because in the Philippines, movie salaries are not where celebrities get rich. Endorsements are. Oh, Kathryn Bernardo that I mentioned earlier who topped the BIR taxpayer list in 2022 has over 30 active endorsement deals. Could even be more today. That's where the real income is.

[00:07:26]It's not just from the films, it's really from the brands. And here is the question nobody in the industry says out loud but everybody in the industry knows. What a face sells the most products? Now, what's a little bit ironic in the telling of the story is that Kathryn Bernardo, who was the highest paid Filipina as I'm able to find the most recent research about this, she's full Filipina, but she is an outlier when you look at the list of celebrities that we're talking about.

[00:07:55]Well, Anne Curtis has talked about this herself. She uses the word halfies to describe mixed-race celebrities like herself. Her own talent manager has said there is a thing in the Philippines for halfies. And he attributes directly to the history of colonization. The industry has a casual word for this phenomena. This is how normalized the pattern is. And it's not just anecdotal.

[00:08:17]Academic researchers have studied this specifically. A study on colorism in Philippine entertainment found that the majority of actors and actresses who achieve the highest success are typically half white or mestizo. Another study found that advertising overwhelmingly features light-skinned or mixed-race models. And it reinforces a specific message. Dark skin is something to be corrected. Light skin is the aspiration. Even in beauty pageants, three of the five Filipino winners of Miss Universe are mixed-race. Pia Wurtzbach, one of the most celebrated, has a German father and a Filipina mother. And the TV series Bagani, which was based on Philippine mythology and was supposed to portray indigenous Filipino characters, got major backlash because the lead actors were mixed-race Filipinos made up to look more brown.

[00:09:09]The word critics used was brownfishing in their own mythology. So, here's what's important to understand.

[00:09:16]Full-blooded Filipinos absolutely do break through. Vice Ganda is the highest-grossing film actor in Philippine history, full Filipina.

[00:09:26]Kathryn Bernardo, who we've already spoken about, the number one celebrity taxpayer in 2022, full Filipina. Coco Martin dominated primetime for years, full Filipina, grew up in Tondo in Metro Manila. Sarah Geronimo built a massive career on her voice, also full Filipina.

[00:09:45]But look how they got there. Vice Ganda through comedy, which is an art form that doesn't really depend on beauty standard. Or Kathryn Bernardo through the love team machinery and sheer consistency over 18 years in the industry or Coco Martin through a single dominant franchise that ran for years.

[00:10:05]Sarah Geronimo really through raw vocal talent. They exceeded because they were so exceptional that they bypassed the default pathway. But the default pathway, the one where you look a certain way and the endorsement deals line up automatically, that pathway still favors a very specific set of features. And this is where it becomes a system and not just a preference because the celebrities who get the most endorsement deals because of how they look are then used to sell the products that promise to make you look more like them. And what products are those? Well, they're skin whitening products. And I have to say when I was new to the Philippines, I was a little bit shocked that you couldn't pick up a bar of soap or lotion or so many other products for your skin that didn't advertise that they were skin whitening. It's like, ironically, where I come from in California, we want to be tanner. We don't want to be more white. And so I would have to really struggle to try to find products that weren't whitening.

[00:11:07]But for the top celebrities in the Philippines, this is what they want to sell. Their faces are on the soap and the lotion and the glutathione capsules.

[00:11:17]The World Health Organization has reported that about half of Filipinos use or have used some type of whitening product. Half the population. And to be honest, I'm surprised it's so low cuz it's so common. These products are absolutely everywhere and it means that a mestizo face selling lighter skin has been seen in every barangay of the country every single day. So that beauty standard shapes who gets cast and who gets cast shapes who gets endorsement deals. And then who gets endorsement deals shapes what products get sold. And the biggest product reinforcing the whole cycle is the one that promises to make your skin look less like what it naturally is. Now, that's not a preference. It's really a closed loop and it was designed 400 years ago. So, let me be clear about what I am not saying. I'm not saying any of these celebrities are less Filipino.

[00:12:10]And Curtis has lived here since she was 12. She speaks Tagalog. She has built her entire career here. Liza Soberano moved to Manila as a kid and she identifies as a Filipino. So this is not about whether they belong. I'm not saying that at all. But it is about whether a system built on colonial racial hierarchy is still deciding who gets rewarded the most in the country's celebrity industry. And the data says it is. I also want to clarify something else. Filipino Chinese families like Heart Evangelista's are hugely influential in Philippine business. But the premium in entertainment is specifically on Western features. The endorsement economy doesn't reward Chinese features the way it rewards European features. That's kind of a different lane. But the distinction matters if you're being honest about what the system actually values. So here's what I've been thinking about for a long time. The Philippines is a country of about 117 million people. The vast majority have darker brown skin.

[00:13:14]That is really what a Filipino looks like. And yet the faces that earn the most money in this country's entertainment industry, the faces that sell the most products, the faces that define what aspirational means in Philippine advertising, disproportionately don't look like most Filipinos. And the system that was imposed centuries ago got so deeply embedded into the culture that it became invisible. It stopped feeling like colonialism. It started feeling like a beauty preference or beauty standard.

[00:13:44]And the economics just followed. Now, I'll be sharing another video soon where I'm going to go deeper into the product that most profits from this system, the skin whitening industry, which is a multi-billion dollar global market built on the idea that the skin you were born with isn't good enough. So stay tuned for that. If you find this channel helpful, I would greatly appreciate if you would take just a moment to subscribe. And as always, guys, thank you so much for taking the time to watch. Take care.