With LolaVie, Jennifer Aniston Adds Beauty Founder to Her Impressive Résumé

Almost 30 years after The Rachel, the Friends star is rethinking hair care.

With LolaVie, Jennifer Aniston Adds Beauty Founder to Her Impressive Résumé

There is a little-known right of passage for Angelenos that caught Jennifer Aniston off guard when she first started driving in Hollywood. “I got my first car, and someone said to me, ‘So, like, what’s the name of your car?’ And I was like, ‘What? You have to name your car in California?’” Nevertheless, Aniston obliged, dubbing her black Saab 900 Lola. “I always liked the song,” she says, referring to Sarah Vaughan’s version of “Whatever Lola Wants,” which has become something of a theme song for the Friends star. “Whenever I’d show up, my friends would say, ‘Lola’s here!’”

Aniston has since leveraged the name in myriad ways, including in 2010 when she launched her debut fragrance, before quickly changing course and going with the more straightforward Jennifer Aniston for Women, which was eventually acquired by Elizabeth Arden. There were murmurs that copyright issues inspired the switch, but it’s also entirely possible that Aniston had bigger plans for LolaVie, which she loosely translates as “Lola’s life, my life”—an illustrious existence that has included superstardom, as well as some very smart business decisions, including this one: Today, LolaVie lives again, as the name of Aniston’s debut beauty brand.

Aniston has dabbled in beauty before, of course. She has transcended the more standard “brand ambassador” title to take on C-suite positions across a range of beauty and wellness categories (her newest role, as the chief creative officer of Vital Proteins, is the latest example of Aniston putting her considerable endorsement power behind a product she simply uses every day). But her own brand, which will be broad-ranging if trademark filings are any indication, will begin where her household fame left off: with her hair.

“This just felt pretty organic to me as my hair is something that has always been one of my struggles,” reveals the onetime owner of The Rachel, who refers to her own honey blond strands as “the Greek frappé on top of my head.” Years of washing and drying and curling and straightening and coloring, both in her personal and professional life, has left Aniston uniquely positioned to talk about damage—and reparative ingredients, of which she has tried many on a long road to hair health. While working with a different hair-care brand, Aniston got “the bug” for formulating, so when the opportunity to become a founder presented itself five years ago via Elizabeth Arden veterans and current LolaVie co-founders Joel Ronkin and Amy Sachs—to create hair products with natural, plant-based ingredients that still perform—Aniston needed little convincing.

LolaVie arrives this morning with a Glossing Detangler that swaps water, a filler ingredient that typically makes up 80 percent of hair-care products, with nourishing, sustainable bamboo essence. Lemon extract imparts “extraordinary shine,” per Aniston, and vegetable ceramides replace conditioning chemicals such as silicones, which can offer immediate gratification but often cause damage over time.

A detangler isn’t necessarily the first product you’d expect from a new hair-care brand, but one of LolaVie’s core principles is to launch products based on need—a hole in the market, or something that can be improved upon—rather than conform to predetermined retail schedules. And Aniston happens to need a good detangler. “I use detanglers all the time when I get out of the shower because of the condition of my hair; it’s hard to get through,” she reveals, adding that she wanted her detangler to be like “the Swiss Army knife of products: It’s a heat protector, it brings nutrients and health back to the hair follicle, it creates shine”—and it happens to be a great sign of what’s to come.