GTN Spotlight · This feature is published under a commercial partnership with the featured business.
Rica Presentacion Hernandez runs a beauty studio on the ground floor of the Thalassa Building in Al Rahah, in the Al Dana area of Abu Dhabi. Arched alcoves, pendant lights, a nail bar, a row of pedicure chairs, her own sign above the reception desk. Ask her what Blink Lash by Rica is about and the answer begins somewhere else entirely: the Philippines, years earlier, and a promise she made to herself in the middle of a bad stretch.
Her website compresses the whole distance into one line: what began as a small home-based beauty service has grown into a trusted salon. Twelve words are carrying about a decade.
What she was actually working against
Her parents worked hard. She says that first, and she says it more than once. Then the family hit real difficulty, and what stayed with her afterwards was not the shortage of money.
What hurt us the most was not only the struggles we were going through, but also being looked down on by other people, especially some of our relatives. It was painful to feel as though we were not valued simply because of our situation in life.
Note where that lands. Not strangers. Relatives. It is the detail that explains most of what follows, and she has clearly turned it over, because what she draws from it is fuel rather than shame: “sometimes the people who look down on you become the very reason you work even harder to succeed.” Out of that came the promise, in two parts. She would work hard enough to change her family’s life, and they would not be looked down on forever.
Why she left
Keeping a promise like that meant leaving the people she had made it for. She goes to the obvious objection before anyone can put it to her.
I am not doing all of this to prove something to other people. I am doing it because I love my family. They are the reason I continue to fight and keep going, no matter how difficult life becomes.
Then comes the part that never reaches a salon website. A new country, a new culture to read, a crowded trade, and the ordinary grind of earning trust from people who have no reason yet to give it. She admits to long stretches of being tired and discouraged, and says it was her family rather than any plan that kept her moving. Those years produced no money worth mentioning. What they produced, by her account, was patience, independence and a tolerance for difficulty that she now treats as the real inheritance.
Why beauty work
Beauty was a choice, not a landing place. She wanted a trade that used creativity and put her in front of people, and she describes the appeal without decorating it: helping women feel confident, and getting to watch that happen. It also keeps her studying, which matters to somebody whose whole story is about refusing to sit still.
One line she offers is easy to skim past.
Treating people with kindness and respect is just as important as having professional skills.
In lash work the technical side is unforgiving and a bad set is visible from across a room, so that can read as a pleasantry. In her trade it is closer to an operating principle. A single-location studio lives on refills, repeat visits and word of mouth inside a few square kilometres. How a client is handled at the desk is the growth strategy, not the manners arranged around it.
What the studio is now
Blink Lash has widened well past the service it is named after. Alongside eyelash extensions it lists facials, manicures and pedicures, nail extensions, body waxing and massage, with a team the business describes as certified and experienced. The salon gives Al Rahah, Al Dana as its address, and takes bookings through its own site and through Instagram, where it posts as @blinklash_byrica. One trace of the earlier chapter is still online: the Facebook page the salon links to is called lovelashbyrica, from before the name settled.
Her plans for it are unglamorous in the way real plans usually are. Improve the technique. Make the room somewhere women are comfortable rather than merely served. Reach genuine financial stability. Create work for other people and not only for herself. Underneath all of it sits one sentence she states outright, without being asked to justify it: she wants to build something she can be proud of and leave to her family.
The shape of the climb will be familiar to anyone who has watched a small business form in the UAE. A skill, then customers, then a licence, then premises, then staff, then a tax registration that arrives with small business relief attached to it. Abu Dhabi has built a great deal of machinery around that path. None of it covers the years that come before a founder needs any of it.
What would she tell herself at the start?
Asked what she would say to her younger self, she offers no business advice at all. Believe in yourself. Be patient with yourself. Take risks, learn new things, step outside the comfort zone. Never forget where you came from, or why you started. Then the line that turns the whole thing over.
The struggles you are facing today will someday become the strength that helps you build the life you dreamed of.
Who is she actually talking to?
She is specific about the audience she has in mind, and it sits well past the client in the chair: women working towards something from a difficult start. Asked what she counts as her achievement, she skips the salon entirely and goes to what it demonstrates: that a beginning is not a verdict, and that the life on the other side of it can be built by somebody who was told she would not manage it. Asked how she would like to be remembered, she puts the success second, behind the people she helped.
Her own summary of the lesson runs to five words: success does not happen overnight. Hers did not, and she declines to write an ending onto it either.
My story is not yet over. I am still fighting, still dreaming, and still working toward a better future.
What is the short version?
Rica Presentacion Hernandez grew up in the Philippines through a period of family hardship, made herself a promise about it, and went abroad to work. She built Blink Lash by Rica as a home beauty service in Abu Dhabi before it became a studio in the Thalassa Building in Al Rahah, Al Dana, covering lashes, facials, nails, waxing and massage. She measures it by whether her family’s life actually changed, and by whether other women who started badly can look at it and believe the same thing is available to them. She says she is not finished.
Other founders in this series who began the same way: Mariya, who turned a lockdown food blog into Reel Dynamics, and Inna Zubritskaya, who started over in Abu Dhabi and built a community around it.
Last updated: 6 September 2026.
