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.”
“So then, I was even more determined to become the leading lady to show that girls can look like me and we can be leading ladies,” she says. Her perseverance worked since Alba has starred in big roles throughout her career. Even though right now, her passion has shifted towards her beauty line, Honest Beauty.
“Honest Beauty, the philosophy around starting this beauty line was about enhancing who you are instead of covering you up and turning you into somebody else,” explains Alba. One of the problems she had when she started acting, was the lack of beauty products that catered to women of color.
“I found it really difficult to find even a foundation because I couldn’t find the right mix of yellow undertones and a little bit of pink because it would go way yellow or go way red and I’m definitely a blend of the two,” she explains. This is something that many Latinas face because their skin tones range from light to dark and often have a difficult time finding the right makeup that fits their skin tone. “I would have makeup artists constantly talk to me about how hard it was to match my skin tone and how they had to use three different types of foundations and they had to mix them together every single time,” she explains.
Alba is super proud of the products that her company offers and says that the older she gets the more she appreciates who she is and the less she wants to be like anybody else. “I think there are different types of ways that people define beauty, to me the most important thing is for your beauty products to bring the best out of you.”