How K-Beauty Inspired Shay Mitchell and Esther Song’s New Kids Skin Care Line
For children, admiration and awe begin in the eyes. It’s the widened gaze as they take in the world—or, in Shay Mitchell’s case, the mirror. The actress, entrepreneur, and mother of two daughters knows the scene well: two sets of curious eyes peeking up at her as her face disappears beneath one of her many jelly masks. In her household, self-care isn’t a solo ritual but a moment of play and connection.
“My girls would always see me with [masks on], especially when getting prepared for any makeup to follow. They would just come into the bathroom and look at me in the mirror and be like, ‘Can I use that? What’s that?’ I’ll even pass them some deodorant—with a lid on, of course—just so they feel like they can be a part of my routine. I also want them to know that skin care, for me, is about creating healthy habits and about having that self-care time—that’s important,” she tells ELLE.com over Zoom.
In the world of motherhood, moments of calm can quickly give way to chaos. One afternoon, Mitchell and her close friend, Esther Song, joined their daughters at a dance camp complete with nail art and face painting. Esther’s daughter opted for a full-face design in vibrant purple, but when it came time to remove it, panic set in. The makeup artist hadn’t offered removal instructions, and neither mother wanted to risk using their own firming, tightening, or brightening products on the delicate skin.
“We’re paper-toweling her face with water to try and get it off. I don’t know what was in this paint, but it stayed on—that stuff, it was really, really strong,” Mitchell recalls with a laugh. Both mothers had been there before—dance recitals, birthday parties, amusement park visits—but the face paint and stage makeup always found their way home. Eventually, they stopped looking elsewhere for gentle solutions and decided to create their own.
That moment of maternal ingenuity sparked the inception of Rini, a beauty brand that marries gentle skin care and play, engineered with kids in mind. The name itself is the Korean translation of “children.” While Rini’s genesis began with a purple face, its story reaches back to the founders’ formative years. Song—chief marketing officer at The Parent Company and a former Tory Burch executive, where she met Mitchell—grew up in Korea until the age of 11, in a household that championed two skin care pillars: hydration and protection. In Mitchell’s Filipino family, beauty practices centered on natural ingredients like coconut oil. Naturally, after consulting chemists, pediatricians, and skin care experts, all roads led to the land of hydration—and the sheet mask capital of the world: Korea.
“My introduction to Korean beauty was through sheet masks and face masks, that’s what Korea is most known for on a global scale, but also that’s just an important prep before anything else. And that’s really important—taking care of your skin first, so masks felt like the right product to launch with. Next comes the play stuff, but we want to make sure we’re moisturizing before we get into the other things,” Mitchell explains.
Rini launches today, November 6, with three inaugural products inviting kids to join the masking bandwagon. The Hydrating Hydrogel Mask—a pink, shimmery, jelly-like treatment—uses vitamin B12 to supercharge skin with moisture. Song and Mitchell also created the After Sun Hydrogel Mask, inspired by a trip the mommypreneurs took to Cabo last April. Mitchell had diligently slathered her daughters in sunscreen, while Song admits she “was not so diligent with SPF on my daughter,” Song remembers. As a result, Mitchell turned into an unofficial chemist, “and created this aloe vera concoction, and put it on Paloma,” Song recalls. Mitchell cooled her creation in the fridge, making it slimy and fun, something Paloma would want to wear. That sense of playfulness and engagement became a cornerstone of Rini’s philosophy.
“It’s about making it fun. Are we using it for firming and tightening? Absolutely not—those aren’t the words we use around kids,” Mitchell chimes in. The result: a green, aloe-infused mask enriched with vitamin E to help calm post-sun or wind-chapped skin. Each hydrogel mask comes in two halves, allowing for full-face or targeted treatment.
Mitchell and Song assure us that their children aren’t “Sephora kids” just yet, but the mothers’ overflowing vanities certainly keep their daughters curious. To keep them entertained, Mitchell sometimes lets her girls apply vitamin E to their brows or lips for extra nourishment. The ingredient’s gentle, all-ages appeal is why it shows up in Rini’s third product, the Everyday Face Sheet Mask. Like the adult version of a wind-down hydration mask after a long day, the Everyday mask is a kid-friendly counterpart. Featuring white tremella mushroom extract, beta-glucan, and vitamin E, the masks are wrapped in playful puppy, unicorn, and panda packaging. Naturally, the first focus group was their daughters.
“We asked our girls what animals they would want, or ‘If you could be a little animal, what would it be,’ and we actually had a long list, but we couldn’t do 50 of them. We narrowed it down to the three,” Mitchell says. Soon, the pair became de facto beauty consultants within their friend groups, fielding messages from parents seeking kid-safe skin care. “All of these messages came in and confirmed it’s not just us. I didn’t realize how many people were so inquisitive about kids’ masks,” Mitchell adds.
As for what’s next, the founders aren’t ruling out more kids’ skin care products down the line. For now, though, Rini’s mission is simple: to ease the growing pains parents face while caring for their children’s skin and to create special bonding moments along the way. Instead of wishing to be part of a parent’s self-care ritual, Rini lets kids start one of their own.