This is an excerpt of the June 2025 Cover Story
Ahtisa Manalo fell.
It was midway through her evening gown walk as a candidate during the Miss Universe Philippines 2025 coronation night. Her heel snagged her pink, ruffled Val Taguba gown. Her knees hit the floor.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t freeze. She got up.
“I just knew that I wanted to get up,” she recalls. “Like the moment I fell, there was no question in my head—I think those were one of the few instances where I had thoughts. Alam mo ‘yung patay-malisya? I was like—maybe if I pretend nothing happened, they would think the same.”
But something did happen. A roar rippled through the crowd, not of shock, but of support.
“What’s crazy to me was I thought they were already shouting loud for me when I went out,” she says. “But when I fell, and I started getting up, I heard the cheers. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, they can be louder.’ I think that’s what kept me going. Honestly, not everyone cheers when you get up after you fall. A lot of people cheer when you fall. But for me, they were cheering when I got up.”
The moment could have undone her. Instead, it became her coronation. And then she won.
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The girl from Candelaria
One Friday evening, I met Manalo over Zoom. She’s in a yellow sundress—sunny, casual, and unmistakably real. Her hair tumbles past her shoulders, her smile unforced. She’s the kind of person you find yourself trusting within minutes, a mix of tita [auntie] charm and Gen Z candor. She giggles often, but never out of nervousness. Her presence is soft, yet assured.
Before she was Miss Universe Philippines, before she stood tall in front of a national audience with a crown pressing gently into her scalp, before the almosts and the could-have-beens—Binibining Pilipinas runner-up to Catriona Gray, Miss International near-winner, and the crownless Miss Cosmo—she was just a girl from Candelaria, Quezon. A girl who knew how to count coins and sacrifices in the same breath.
“I started doing pageants at ten years old,” she tells me, brushing a hand through her hair. “But not because I started it, not because it was a dream, but because it was something that I saw could be a vehicle to help myself and help my family.” There’s no performance in her voice, just plain truth.
“The reason why I agreed to do my first pageant is because they told me that if I win—one year free ‘yung tuition,” she says. “And that’s huge for someone who grew up in a poor family, who didn’t have a permanent dwelling, because we would live from relatives to relatives. We would move houses.”
This is the origin story they don’t always tell. No sequins, no sash dreams, just a girl with sharp instincts, realizing that beauty—if wielded wisely—could be bartered for stability.
“Sabi ko, that’s something that could help me,” she adds. “And I think that’s where it started. I saw that. It could be something that could help me.”
It began with necessity, but bloomed into something larger: self-discovery.
Destiny calls
If 2024 was her swan song, 2025 was the unexpected encore.
“I really thought I was done,” Manalo says, leaning into the camera. She shrugs, a little sheepish. “Because I gave it my all, like I planned a year in advance. Alam mo ‘yun? I feel like, logically, I did everything right I could at that time.”
Miss Cosmo was supposed to be the final curtain call. Her performance was polished, her walk unshakable, her gowns liquid perfection. And when the crown didn’t land, she took it with grace.
The plan was to pivot, to put away the heels and use everything she had learned from the pageant world and entrepreneurship and channel it somewhere else—somewhere quieter.
“I said maybe I could use my skills like dealing with people, coming up with something from the ground up—to channel it into something else,” she explains. “And then the opportunity came for public office, and I thought, oh, my skills are properly aligned with being a public servant.”
But the moment she dipped one Louboutin into that world, something didn’t feel right. “When one foot was already in, I saw that it wasn’t for me,” Manalo says. “I don’t think I could play the game that people play in that world.”
It’s the most diplomatically delivered mic drop I’ve heard in a while. She continues, gentler now. “It wasn’t aligned with my values. And more than anything, I said that maybe not this time yet. Maybe I haven’t grown enough as a person to include myself in that world.”
So, there she was. In the murky middle: not a queen, not a candidate, not quite sure where she was headed next. The liminal space where people either break or bloom.
“I said sige, I’ll rest muna. Then I’ll recalibrate,” Manalo tells me. She started judging local pageants, doing hostings here and there.
And then the signs started showing up. Like breadcrumbs from the universe both annoyingly subtle and cosmically loud.
First came the news that Maureen Montagne, the original Miss Universe Philippines candidate for Quezon Province, had resigned. “Maybe you could replace her,” some friends teased her.
“Wala na,” she said at the time. “I’m done na with that. I don’t think I’m for pageants pa.”
But the thought stayed with her, lingered like perfume after a night out.
Sign two: Miss Universe announced it would be held in Thailand. “I said to myself, I feel like Thai people would like me. Feeling ko, ako ‘yung market nila,” she grins, recalling her thoughts at the time.
Still, she dismissed it. “It’s just a thought,” she says. But you can tell, in hindsight, that the seed had already been planted.
Then came sign number three. “Yung may nag-tag ng photo sakin,” she says, her eyes lighting up with half amusement, half disbelief. Someone had used a photo of her in a salon promotion—somewhere in Thailand, or so she thought. It turned out to be Cambodia.
“Their letters look similar, right?” she laughs. But the takeaway was the same: strangers from other countries believed in her, even when she didn’t.
She says, “If there are people from other countries that used my photo in their country and think that I could do it, why don’t I believe in myself?”
That was when the serious internal dialogue began. The kind that happens quietly, in the gaps between plans. “I started thinking about it—really thinking about it,” Manalo says. “But I was like, how am I even going to do this? There’s so much to plan. My team already knows I’m not doing pageants anymore, they’re probably supporting someone else by now.”
So she tucked the idea back into the drawer. Until dinner happened. The fourth sign.
“I had dinner with these friends who were involved in my pageant journey last year,” Manalo says. “And then they asked me, ‘Oh, why don’t you do it again? There’s no Quezon Province anymore.’”
So they checked. “Let’s see if Quezon Province still doesn’t have a representative,” she remembers saying. “This was like four days before the contract signing.”
Manalo laughs at the absurdity of it. “I was thinking, I’m sure they got someone already. You know how it works—the franchise fee, the paperwork—it’s too late.”
They tried calling the franchise owner that night. No answer. “Wala na ‘to [It’s too late],” Manalo remembers thinking. “They have a girl already.”
The next morning, just before flying to Laoag, Ilocos Norte to judge a local pageant, she got a call from the franchise owner: Quezon Province still didn’t have a representative. The catch? The contract signing for Miss Universe Philippines was set a day before her return flight.
“So I said, okay, last test,” she tells me, grinning now. “If I get a plane ticket before Friday, then it’s for me. If I don’t, if ubos na, then that’s it.”
And then divine comedy or cosmic orchestration—there were five seats left on the flight.
“Five seats,” she says again, slower this time. “So many things had to go right—and it all went right.”
The ghost of her grandmother
Earlier this year, Manalo lost the woman who’d been her guiding force in her life, her grandmother.
“She was the one who really believed in me. Who helped me get through school. Who pushed me,” she says softly, her voice breaking into a pause. “I owe so much of who I am to her.”
Her passing reshaped everything. “When we lost her, I remember being there the whole time, during the internment. And I just kept thinking, what am I doing with my life?” Manalo says. “It made me realize I could go at any time. Anyone around me could go at any time. So why am I still saying no to things just because I don’t feel ready?”
Manalo had spent much of her life second-guessing herself, letting opportunities pass. “That’s been a theme for me, thinking I couldn’t do something, so I didn’t even try.”
But something shifted during those quiet, grief-filled days. “I was talking to someone…I don’t even remember who, I was emotionally clouded but they told me, ‘You can never be 100% ready for something. You just have to believe your life has prepared you.’ And that stuck with me.”
Her final answer on coronation night was, in many ways, an offering—a tribute not only to her grandmother, but to a version of herself that finally chose to say yes.
“I felt like I’d be doing her a disservice if I kept shrinking myself,” Manalo says. “She fought so hard so I could have a better life. The least I could do was believe in myself the way she always did.”
Beyond beauty
If you’re expecting Manalo to fit neatly into the typical pageant mold, prepare to be surprised.
“I want to be a symbol of hope,” she declares, not as a soundbite but as a mission. “If someone like me—who lived in a 15-square-meter makeshift house between two buildings, who used to move from one relative’s home to another—can turn things around, then you can, too.”
Her mom was a housewife. Her stepfather, a tricycle driver. “We weren’t just poor—we were struggling in every way,” she says. “And yet here I am. I have my own apartment. My own business. My own voice.”
Some titleholders arrive on the pageant stage with neatly packaged advocacies, a single issue to rally around. Manalo doesn’t. And she’s not sorry about it.
“If I’m being completely honest with you, I don’t know what advocacy I want to push yet on the bigger stage,” she says without hesitation. “I think as a person, it’s just hard for me to have one thing…I don’t even have a favorite food. Why would I force myself to pick one cause when there are so many things I care about?”
Manalo adds, “I’m multitude of things, like I have so many different aspects of me that I feel like it’s a disservice to who I am if I just pick one thing.”
There’s Alon Akademie, where she works with children to rethink what education can look like in the Philippines. The goal isn’t high grades or gold medals but self-awareness. “We ask kids what lights them up, what they’re naturally good at, and we teach from there. Not everyone thrives in a classroom. I didn’t.”
But there’s also the work she’s done with survivors of sexual abuse. That one is harder to talk about, not because it’s less important but because it’s personal.
Maybe that’s Manalo’s advocacy: not choosing just one cause, but rejecting the idea that a beauty queen must be a singular, polished ideal. Perhaps it’s about showing that a woman can be many things at once: loud and soft, brave and unsure and that complexity doesn’t make her less worthy of the crown.
Read more of Ahtisa Manalo’s journey to the Miss Universe Philippine crown in MEGA’s JUNE 2025 issue now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.
Photography by DOOKIE DUCAY. Creative Direction by PATRICK TY. Fashion Direction by ROKO ARCEO. Sittings Editor PEEWEE REYES-ISIDRO. Art direction by BRIE VENTURA and CLARE MAGNO. Multimedia Artist TROY NONATO. Beauty direction by AGOO AZCUNA-BENGZON assisted by MARA GO. Makeup by MICKEY SEE. Hair by RENZ PANGILINAN. Fashion Associate ERICA TEROL. Producer THESSMAR LECTURA . Nails by JENNIFER PASCUAL of TRIPLE LUCK NAIL AND BROW SALON. Production Design by TIPPING POINT. Shot on Location at ONE HECTARE CREATIVE GROUNDS
Special thanks to EL JOHN MENDOZA and MS. UNIVERSE PHILIPPINES
