The $24 Skin Care Essential That Jessica Alba Uses To Look Alive On Zoom

In some ways, you could say that 2020 has been a great equalizer. The virus doesn’t care who you are, and so the saying, ‘Stars, they’re just like us!’ has taken on new meaning in 2020. Most people are sitting on their couches, removed from their normal lives, leaving the house in masks, spending more time on Zoom than they'd like, and anticipating a very strange holiday season. And like the rest of them, Jessica Alba is trying to find and create joy wherever she can.

The actor, mom of three, and businesswoman has amped up her self-care routine these past nine months — and her little ones are getting involved, too. “It's like spa day every day in this house with my girls. Even Hayes wants to put a mask on!” Alba says, referring to herself and her children: Honor, 12; Haven, 9; and her littlest, son Hayes, who is almost 3. “So we pretend and give him a fake mask for his face. We do self-care, literally I'm not even kidding, almost every day,” she says.

It’s unsurprising, of course, as the founder and face of Honest Beauty, that Alba’s day-to-day is heavy on beauty, but she’s making even more time for these rituals now that she’s home. “I'm not a morning person, but I just go straight to my sink, and I put my bear ears or cat ears headband on and then my purple mask on my face,” she says of her new daily masking routine. The mask in question is the Honest Beauty Prime + Perfect Mask which, she explains, “just primes your face for the day and it's freaking amazing. It's like a berry smoothie on your face, it smells like a smoothie, too. It's got tons of antioxidants and you just feel more awake. Then I get coffee or tea, write some emails, sometimes I do some breathing exercises, and it just gives me that great jump off for the day. That's something that I learned over quarantine, just how important it is to do the little self-love things.”

Alba’s beloved purple mask can be found in Dew Wonders Holiday Gift Set, which Alba notes is basically her morning routine in a box. It’s also got the kitten ear headband Alba wears while masking, and full sizes of the Vitamin C Radiance Serum and Everyday Radiance Moisturizer.

Alba is a firm believer in a solid skin care routine. “I've always been a big skin junkie—it's all about starting with a good canvas,” but adds that she still puts on a little makeup for a Zoom call. She sticks to minimal makeup, and notes that “a good ring light is always the jam.” Her main goal, she explains, is to make sure that all this screen time does not contribute to any premature aging, and she does this with a couple Honest Beauty staples. The hero here is the recently launched Honestly Bright Eyes Tinted Eye Cream (a true skin care-makeup hybrid product) — it’s a “hydrogel, watery moisturizer, mixed with some pigment and it counters the blueness under your eyes,” Alba says.

The other key is the brand’s CCC Clean Corrective with Vitamin C Tinted Moisturizer, which, Alba explains “actually helps shield you from the blue light from your screen which can actually cause damage, like you would get from the sun. So we have that blue light protectant, which is great because I've never been in front of more screens in my entire life. It's just like the rays are just coming at me all the time. I'm like: ‘I am not trying to premature age with all these screens, no thank you.’”

Alba’s final touch is a bold lip — especially in the winter. “The more dreary it is, the more gray and cold, even if I'm wearing sweats, I'm going to bring out a red, or a pink, or something, a nice color just to give me some life to my face,” she says.

In between self-care sessions, there’s another hobby filling time at the Alba house — TikTok, of course. “The girls do TikToks, and they get frustrated when I don't learn the TikToks fast enough,” she says. Of course, Alba’s on TikTok, too, where she has 5.7 million followers. There, you’ll find her cooking with Camila Coelho, doing Honest Beauty glam and skin care routines, and co-starring in transition videos with her family.

“I think the most fun videos are the transition videos. They’re the most creative. We also do dances, and once you get it, but then it takes so long to get the dance, that you just want to keep doing that one dance over and over again.” Her daughters teach her the moves — a responsibility that mostly falls on Honor, as Haven, Alba notes “gets too frustrated with me, and also shouldn’t even really be on the platform. She just steals her sister's phone and learns the dances. But Honor is really patient with me.”

Needless to say, she’s managed to keep her family’s schedule pretty busy. “We've been baking. We watch movies. We try to do some walks or some kind of family exercising afterwards. Probably not enough of that, but we do try to do a little bit of it here and there. It's like we're all in the same boat.”

With all this family activity, when asked how she and husband Cash Warren are keeping their romance alive, Alba’s answer is likely one most parents can relate to. “I think we've definitely failed in that. We need to do more date night type things. I mean, even just date night at home, something where you're just like, ‘Kids go to bed, mom and dad are going to not have to do errands and have dinner together,’ but we just don't do that enough...I think I just have to make it a priority.”

Alba’s other top priority and her greatest holiday wish is perhaps the most relatable of all: “Sleep? I don't know. I felt like I haven't slept a lot since COVID,” she says, adding that it would also be nice if her kids would watch some classic cartoon movies, and not just YA stuff. “I keep asking ‘Can't we just watch classic Christmas movies?’ They're like, ‘Mom, we're sick of watching old stuff.’” Guess they won’t be watching Miracle on 34th Street this year!

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