Jennifer Garner on Skincare, Self-Confidence, and Passing Down the “Garner Girl Aesthetic' to Her Daughters
“Big time magazine editor” Jenna Rink’s spiky bun and frosted eyeshadow had a chokehold on the early 2000s beauty aesthetic in the same way thateffect. Something about seeing her, rather her characters, made beauty—be it bold wigs or the bathroom drawer of a really, really cool 30-something—feel transformative. Off-screen however, Garner prefers more stripped down approach to beauty.
“It’s important to be in love with how you look without any makeup on and with your hair in a bun,” the Neutrogena ambassador exclusively tells Marie Claire. “When you get ready and look fabulous—celebrate all of that. When you spend a little more time on yourself, you can feel like,But you don’t want to look at yourself in the mirror and be shocked at what you see because you’re so used to masking it.
Cut to her role as a mom, and her beauty ethos has stayed on par. Even though Garner emphasizes exploration to her children, she admits that her two daughters, Violet, 16, and Seraphina, 13, have taken up a similar attitude towards superfluous beauty. “They see what I value. When they were super little and I would come home from work the first thing they would say is, ‘Go wash your face! Your eyebrows are too dark,’” she jokes.
Despite a pared down, traditionally makeup-free appearance, Garner is very much a beauty girl at heart. She’s a skincare devotee, working with Neutrogena for the past 15 years. “I know their stuff backwards and forwards. I drank their kool-aid a really long time ago and believe in it with my whole heart,” she says. The Golden Globe winner also has some hair hacks up her sleeve, dating back to the onset of her acting career.
“You just get to a certain point where your skin stops turning over new cells as quickly as it does when you're younger and you have to give it a little hug. You need to give it a little boost—and that's just what retinol does. But there are different kinds of retinol. You can buy retinol from a doctor's office that costs a hundred thousand dollars, or you can buy it at the drugstore. The [Neutrogena Retinol Pro Plus] has a super gentle formulation.