Our Story
Sulina Shop is more than skincare. It is a story of identity, resilience, and heritage.
Founded by sisters Susan and Shelina, two Indo-Fijian women born in Fiji and raised in California, Sulina was created to honor the ingredients and traditions our community preserved through generations, and to finally build the brand our diaspora never had.
Our Roots
Generations ago our ancestors were brought from India to Fiji as indentured laborers under British colonial rule, to work the sugarcane plantations. They arrived in a new land with almost nothing familiar.
But they carried something with them.
Ingredients. Traditions. A quiet knowing about what worked on skin like theirs. Passed down not through written recipes or formal rituals, but through observation, through family, through generations of quiet practice.
A lot was lost in the crossing. The language changed. The rituals adapted. The culture fragmented. But something unexpected happened along the way. The traditions that survived began to intertwine with Fiji itself. With the tropical botanicals, the Pacific climate, and the natural abundance of the island. What arrived and what grew from the land became something new. Something shaped by two worlds. Something uniquely ours.
And those things became Sulina Shop.
Our Philosophy
The ingredients we grew up with were never a trend. They were a truth our community lived long before anyone thought to study them.
Some were carried across oceans. Turmeric, used on our skin for generations. Coconut oil, passed down without instruction, just a quiet knowing that it worked.
Others came from the island itself. Tamanu oil, native to Fiji, became part of our lives not through ancestry, but through living there. Through cultural exchange. Through the land offering something new.
What we carried and what Fiji gave us became the foundation of Sulina Shop. Not beauty frozen in tradition, but beauty shaped by movement, by place, by experience.
We believe the best skincare doesn't come from chasing trends, but from understanding what has worked, why it works, and respecting where it comes from.
Science doesn't define these ingredients. It helps explain what people already knew.
Our Name
Sulina, a blend of Susan and Shelina, was never planned. Like most things that are meant to be.
We’re five years apart, but our birthdays are just one day apart - a small reminder of how closely connected we’ve always been. In many ways, that bond is the heart of Sulina Shop: two sisters, two stories, one shared purpose.
Our Purpose
Sulina Shop exists for everyone who has ever carried something beautiful across a distance and wondered if anyone would recognize it.
It is not just skincare.
It is remembrance.
It is resilience.
It is visibility.
