When a celebrity is launching a beauty brand, they’ll often invite press to come see the vision in person. Maybe it’s a day of appointments in a hotel suite or a celebration of the launch in a restaurant over breakfast. (In fact, I just came from one of those with Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman for the brand’s new “tallow tin body butter”—more on that another time!)
But for Jennifer Lawrence, it was the Metrograph, one of lower Manhattan’s trendiest arthouse cinemas. Even though it was 10 a.m., we were served popcorn as we watched a brand video/short film, featuring people, Lawrence included, dancing freely and flipping their hair around.
Lawrence, the Oscar-winning actress, has at 36 years old been working for two decades. While she’s often had a funny, relatable public persona, she’s kept much of her life private. Until a few weeks ago, she didn’t even have an Instagram account. So her choice of venue felt appropriately unusual as she dips her toe into a new endeavor.
Yesterday, her new brand Mes officially launched. It’s a prestige haircare brand, debuting with three products priced from $34 to $52. It’s a pivot for Lawrence, who until now has pretty much exclusively promoted her films and luxury brands like Dior.
She told us that she started working on the brand three years ago, tracking down the chemical engineer-turned-beauty founder Jasmina Aganovic after watching her TED Talk. MIT-trained Aganovic takes a scientific approach to beauty. Her company Arcaea has raised $78 million and previously created the fragrance brand Future Society, which makes scents by sequencing the DNA of extinct flowers.
While Lawrence hasn’t talked about it much until now, she is telling a story about her long history with her hair as an actress in Hollywood. “I had no agency over my hair at all,” she said at the Metrograph. “Not the color, not the cut, and everything was hot tools every day on set … especially during Hunger Games, where my hair was being dyed brown and then bright blonde. It was so fried that I ended up cutting it all off. I don’t know if everybody remembers the pixie days.”
She’s also building a narrative as a busy professional and mom who doesn’t have time for fussy products, hence the brand’s name. It’s a relatable concept—so relatable, in fact, that there is already a haircare brand called Messy from Drybar founder Alli Webb. “I get photographed pretty much every time I leave my house, but I don’t have time to give myself a blowout,” Lawrence said.
Mes’s most innovative product is a mask that can go on dry hair. That’s new for the haircare industry, just as founding a brand is new for Lawrence. Mes’s debut will be a test of how celebrity-driven brands can succeed in 2026—especially one from a traditional, A-list movie star, rather than an influencer celebrity who lives and breathes social media, like Alix Earle or Hailey Bieber.
Lawrence’s Instagram debut is the clearest signal that this is on her radar. Another prestige actress, Scarlett Johansson, just saw her skincare brand the Outset shut down—and Johansson never made an Instagram account.
So far Lawrence has posted images of her hair tests for recognizable films like American Hustle and X-Men; shared a quick video spritzing product in her hair; and started a TikTok trend with one comment, interspersed with reminders to vote in the midterms.
She told The Cut that she’s treating the brand as if she’s “made the greatest thing on Earth” as a form of “forced manifestation.” Now, it’s breaking out into the real world.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.
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PARTING WORDS
"It’s not lost on me how crazy this is, and I will cherish it forever because Nashville is the place that honed and polished this thing about myself."
—Taylor Swift on becoming the youngest artist inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame