At a glance

• Award: Bronze Lion, Brand Experience & Activation (Cultural Engagement)
• Where: Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2026, French Riviera, France (June 22–26)
• Partners: Wardah × Dentsu Creative Jakarta × Digital Nativ
• Campaign reach: Over 4.07 million people, with an estimated earned media value of US$112,000

For decades, a hearing aid's microphone has sat behind the ear  exactly where a hijab folds over and muffles it. Wardah's answer: move the microphone outside the fabric entirely, disguised as a small silver brooch pinned to the outer layer of the hijab. That single design shift just won the Indonesian beauty brand its first Cannes Lion.

The device, called Hear in Hijab, picked up a Bronze Lion in the Brand Experience & Activation (Cultural Engagement) category at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2026, held on France's French Riviera from June 22 to 26. It's the invention of a collaboration between Wardah, Dentsu Creative Jakarta, and Digital Nativ, built specifically for elderly Muslim women who wear the hijab daily and struggle with conventional hearing aids.

What is Hear in Hijab?

Hear in Hijab is a two-part hearing device. A brooch-style transmitter clips to the outside of the hijab and captures sound, then sends it wirelessly to a receiver worn in the ear. The pin doubles as a piece of jewelry, so there's no visible medical device  just an accessory that happens to help someone hear their grandchildren clearly again.

The idea didn't come from a lab. It came from research sessions with elderly hijab-wearing women who use hearing aids, where the team watched a mundane, daily frustration play out: readjusting a hijab, missing half a sentence, asking someone to repeat themselves in a crowded room.

Why did a beauty brand win for a non-beauty product?
That's the part that makes this newsworthy. Cannes Lions is advertising's most prestigious global stage, and Wardah entered not with a lipstick campaign but with an assistive device. Group Head of New Brand Innovation at ParagonCorp, Khikin Indahsari, tied the project directly to the brand's broader premise about aging and identity: the hijab is an expression of faith and identity closely tied to confidence, to hearing loved ones clearly, and to feeling present and empowered.

"Beauty belongs to every woman, at every stage of her life."

That's the line ParagonCorp keeps returning to  and it's the reason the jury didn't see this as a stretch. Cultural engagement, the category Wardah won, rewards ideas rooted in a specific, lived community need. A hearing aid shaped like a brooch, built with the exact women who'd wear it, fits that brief better than most beauty campaigns ever could.

Was this Hear in Hijab's first award?
No  Cannes Lions was its second. Before France, Hear in Hijab already won the Grand Prix of Medium, the top prize at Indonesia's own Citra Pariwara 2025 advertising awards. Cannes Lions marks the first time the idea has been recognized on a global stage rather than a national one.

For an industry that's spent 70-plus years crowning ads about products, Hear in Hijab is a reminder that the most award-worthy idea in a beauty brand's portfolio might not be a product at all  it might be a fix for a problem nobody else bothered to notice.