Jessica Alba has come a long way since her first InStyle cover in June 2007.
“Looking back, when I shot my first InStyle cover, I was insecure. I felt like I needed to be someone I wasn’t in order to be accepted. I allowed other people’s ideas of who they thought I should be to define me,” Alba, 38, wrote in a new essay published by the magazine Tuesday.
She continued, “Who am I now? I give zero f–ks. I have three children. They’ve exploded my body, and I’m cool with it. And I know I’m smart. I don’t care what everybody else thinks. I’m good, girl. I’m good.”
The Honest Beauty founder recalls that she was 26 when she landed her first cover with the magazine.
“By that time I’d been in the [entertainment] business for over a decade, but I was still trying to figure out how to be in the public eye and have ownership over who I was,” she said. “Ninety percent of what people understood about me then came purely from magazine articles, press-tour interviews, and blurbs of gossip.”
Six years later, Alba, then in her early 30s, was finally confident with her body and who she was as a person.
“I also stopped allowing myself to be objectified in the press through a male’s perspective,” she said. “Screw that, man. It’s OK to be sexy. It’s OK to wear a short skirt or a loud print if I feel like it because I own it in my own way. I can flaunt what I want, cover what I want, and still feel good.”
For her most recent cover, in July 2018, Alba wrote: “If I had been younger, I probably would have been obsessed with dieting and exercising, but instead I thought, ‘This is where I’m at. This is my life. And this is my body.'”