Adding to her many accolades, including an Oscar, multiple Golden Globes and a Dior ambassadorship, Jennifer Lawrence is taking on another role: beauty brand founder.
On Tuesday, Lawrence is unveiling her hair brand Mes°, which she co-created with MIT grad and biotech startup Arcaea founder Jasmina Aganovic after being impressed with the latter’s Ted Talk on the future of the category.
Using biology as a design tool, Mes° will launch with three products: Multitask Repair Mask, $52, a hair mask that can be used on dry hair before shampooing, overnight while you sleep, or worn out as a sleek wet look or slicked-back bun; Off-Duty Restyling Serum, $44, designed to help extend the life of great hair, and Good Roots Volume Mist, $34, powered by proprietary ARC-5™ Technology to lift the roots while biologically helping manage excess oil. To start with, the brand will be available direct to consumer.
Lawrence has wanted to launch a hair brand for several years, but didn’t feel like she had found the right partner until she came across Aganovic, whose Arcaea has raised $78 million in series A funding from investors including Chanel, Givaudan and Olaplex. Lawrence, too, has become an investor in Arcaea, while Mes° is a 50-50 venture between the duo. Lawrence’s official title is founder and Aganovic is chief executive officer.
“It was always hair,” said Lawrence. “There was something so glaringly missing for me as a consumer that I wanted to find, and then when I didn’t, it was just kind of like, ‘OK, well, I have to make it.’
“I didn’t want to remake something that already exists,” Lawrence continued. “I knew that something new needed to be created, and that opportunity didn’t exist until Arcaea and Jasmina.”
Lawrence also had a name ready to go.
“I knew that I wanted my imaginary hair product one day to be called Mes°, because I didn’t want to make something that was for overstyled perfect hair,” she said. “I wanted it to be for the messiness of life. I have been referred to as a mess my whole life, so the name resonates with me.”
For the products themselves, Lawrence and Aganovic wanted to focus on formulations that enhance hair health during styling rather than compromise it.
“I always felt like I had to choose between my hair looking good and styling it, but consequently dehydrating it with hairspray and hot tools and teasing,” said Lawrence, “or hair health, where I’m putting on a thick mask or using an oil and my hair is falling flat and it’s listless.
“I just wanted to know that what I was putting on my hair made it healthier, and that I can also wear it outside and not look ridiculous. With these products, your hair gets healthier and stronger with every single use, and they’re also styling products,” she said.
This ethos fit with Arcaea’s research into the chemistry of the hair care category. “We saw that everyone was viewing hair as this dead fiber, and from a biological standpoint, it was anything but,” said Aganovic, who was a chemical and biological engineering major at MIT. “So we had this very different lens with which we were looking at hair care already.”
The Multitask Repair Mask, for example, is formulated with a biomimetic tri-lipid complex and olive squalane. The brand said it delivers six times less breakage while strengthening hair with up to 158 percent more lipids and a 32 percent reduction in protein loss during washing.
Good Roots Volume Mist addresses the loss of volume in hair caused by excess oil buildup at the roots by combining root-lifting styling agents with a proprietary technology that contains microalgae to help balance excess oil. It claims to deliver almost three times the volume and reduce scalp oiliness by 75 percent.
Meanwhile, Off-Duty Restyling Serum is a bi-phase formula that combines a lightweight oil phase to smooth frizz and add shine, and a serum phase to strengthen and help reshape hair.
In addition to creating products that would enhance rather than sap hair health, the duo also wanted to simplify the hair-styling routine. “We talked about the fact that hair care and skin care had gone in this direction of more steps, more elaborate routines,” said Aganovic. “The gap was really, hey, we’re not going to go in that direction. The opportunity is actually to simplify people’s routines, and do so in a way that delivers exceedingly high performance and excellent long-term benefits.”
That vision informed the trio of products the duo is launching with, which are formulated to elongate the time between wash days, meaning less blowouts and less hot tools, as well as simplifying the number of products used in a routine.
“With the Good Root Spray, you don’t need a dry shampoo because it will keep your hair from getting oily for more days,” said Aganovic. “With the restyling serum, you won’t need an extra detangler because your hair become less tangled.”
The Multitask Repair Mask, meanwhile, reposits the idea of a traditional repair mask, which usually require consumers to stop what they’re doing, get in the shower, wait 20 minutes rinse, and style all over again. Instead, Multitask is a clear formula that can be applied to dry hair and gives hair a wet look.
Lawrence has been intimately involved with all aspects of the brand, from products to packaging to marketing campaign, which features a video of people (both models and civilians alike) dancing freely to the same piece of music. Lawrence wanted the casting to be a reflection of the diverse population of New York City, which she calls home.
“The way we worked on it was that being unbothered, being relaxed, is in its own way an aspirational thing,” said director Isaac Lock. “We wanted to embody this process that showed people overcoming their kind of awkwardness and actually overcoming their botheredness.”
The social rollout plan also saw Lawrence join Instagram in September, where she’s quickly racked up 8.4 million followers.
“This was going to be the only way for me to have agency over what was being said and where it was going, and for it to be personal,” she said. “I’ve really enjoyed it, and I think I’m going to enjoy being able to contribute in a meaningful way, as opposed to doing an interview where I don’t have control over what’s being said and when and how and the pull quotes and everything.”
Since Lawrence began acting, the red carpet glam process has become much more intensive, often requiring hours with stylists, makeup artists and hairstylists perfecting their clients’ looks.
Asked if she could see that simplified with this brand, she said: “It could be cool to start having a more undone look. I feel like the precedent is so set, with these events that it could be fun to shake that up more. I have no problem doing that in my in my off-time, but at work it does just feel like, oh, I have work. That’s two hours in the hair and makeup chair. It would be fun to challenge that.”