Jessica Alba thought she was dumb for not going to university.
The 35-year-old actress – who founded the billion-dollar empire, The Honest Company – admitted she used to be insecure about her lack of higher education.
She told the Observer Magazine: “I thought I was dumb because I didn’t go to college. I felt if you didn’t have a degree you’d never be respected or considered intelligent. Now I realise I’m perfectly capable of doing lots of things.”
And Jessica admitted she used to be afraid to speak up about being objectified in Hollywood.
She explained: “Success in entertainment used to be purely financial for me. Once I was in my mid-20s and had achieved some degree of security, I started looking for something more substantive to focus on. Then when I got pregnant a few years later, I came up with the idea for my company.
“When I was young I didn’t know how to speak up [at work] and say, ‘I don’t like this.’ I wasn’t that person [a sex symbol] people were portraying me as. I come from a pretty conservative background; I was a tomboy wearing baggy clothes. But you’re being marketed in a movie to sell it – I understood it was the characters I was playing.”
However, Jessica – who has two daughters with her husband Cash Warren – never set out to create an empire.
She said: “As a new mum, I found it challenging to find effective products without things like synthetic fragrances. I wanted to create a consumer goods company that stands for transparency and is actually profitable. Hollywood can be hard for the faint of heart. People hustle to be successful and then that moment when they feel they’ve made it, it disappears in an instant. I don’t feel like my persona in entertainment defines me. I’ve never put a whole lot of importance on it. When I was on every magazine cover and in all the new movies, I knew a lot of it would go away.
“I spend a lot more time on my business than acting. When I can find the time and it’s entertainment, I’ll do something.”
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