The Modern Serve: What Brought Canadian Beauty Influencer Waepril Chua to the Tennis Court?
Beauty creator Waepril Chua launches The Modern Serve, a tennis platform covering instruction, wellness, style and travel for adults learning the game.
Waepril Chua will tell you, unprompted, that she is not good at tennis yet. She started as an adult, the way most recreational players do, and her new site documents real stretches of that progress rather than only the finished, polished version of it.
For years, Waepril Chua has built her beauty platform on a simple rule: test the product before talking about it. She’ll sit with something for weeks, tracking how her skin actually responds, before she films anything about it. It’s a slower process than most influencer timelines run on, and it’s put her in the room with brands like L’Occitane, whose hand cream she names as a personal favorite, Vichy Laboratoires, and the skin-focused label BAO Laboratory, which she’s featured in recent content.
She previously worked with Vestir, an online marketplace for luxury designer pieces. More recently, she collaborated with Korean skincare brand Beauty of Joseon and Costco Canada, and the completed campaign is now live on her Instagram.
Tennis got a version of the same instinct. Chua took it up as an adult and found little content that reflected that experience. So this summer she launched The Modern Serve for players who came to the game late, covering instruction, wellness, style and travel through the eyes of someone still learning.
Photo Credit: Waepril Chua
Waepril Chua has already spent time at the Mouratoglou Academy on the French Riviera, a camp she says she really enjoyed, and photos from that trip are already on the site. Getting out to the Rafa Nadal Academy in Mallorca is on her list next, something she’d love to turn into a future entry in her Tennis Life series if the trip comes together. She’s also traveling to Shanghai in October for the Rolex Shanghai Masters, and she’s planning to write about the experience once she’s back.
“If I get the chance, I’d love to talk to Carlos Alcaraz or Holger Rune about coming back from injury,” she says. “I’m working on a piece about tennis injuries for the blog, and I think a lot of recreational players dealing with their own setbacks would get something out of hearing how the pros handle it.” There’s one interview she’s after above the rest, and it isn’t a player. “I’d love to be a guest on Andy Roddick’s Served podcast,” Chua says. “He’s so straightforward and genuine, he just says what’s on his mind, and I respect that.”
Closer to home, she’s also planning to cover tennis facilities and programs around the greater Vancouver area, the kind of practical, local content that recreational players tend to go looking for and often can’t find, in keeping with the way she’s approached the rest of the site.
Waepril Chua doesn’t think of any of this as a pivot away from beauty, since that side of her work hasn’t slowed down. “These interests overlap more than people assume,” she says. “Wellness, style, and travel all connect to how someone experiences a sport. The Modern Serve is where I bring those subjects together.” Whether she’s talking through a hand cream or a rough day on the court, it’s the same person doing it: someone more interested in showing the actual process than the finished version of it.
The Modern Serve is live now at TheModernServe.com, with new entries in the Tennis Life series and instructional content published on a rolling schedule.
Disclaimer: Written in partnership with Ravi Rajapaksha.
