Jessica Alba’s skin and makeup always looks flawless and why not, after all, she’s the owner of Honest Beauty. But, even though she has beautiful olive skin, she explains that it wasn’t always easy landing leading roles or even finding the right foundation that matched her skin tone, something that led her to create a company that catered to a variety of skin tones.
“When I started getting a lot of roles and auditioning, they couldn’t figure out my ethnicity, I would always get called exotic,” explains Jessica Alba to TIME. Apparently, she didn’t look Latina enough to play a Latina and not Caucasian enough to play the leading lady, which not surprisingly is always a white female. She would always land the “exotic” roles or secondary roles because she didn’t fit the mold. There were a lot of random roles for exotic and that was a really weird thing for her to wrestle with because she never looked at herself that way. “I was raised to embrace the skin I was born with because it’s me.”
