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Jennifer Coolidge is not a morning person. “I really don’t come alive until like 8 or 9 at night—when everyone else is going to bed, I’m feeling alive,” she says. To help wake herself up, the actor relies on a tried-and-true beauty trick: ice cubes trailed over the face for a de-puffing, tightening, and invigorating effect. “If filling my bathtub with ice wasn’t so labor intensive, I would do it.”
The world is waking up to Coolidge in turn. The actor’s recent renaissance—or Jenissance, if you will—is down to some scene-stealing (and Emmy-winning) roles and an innately iconic presence that forces fans to rethink what it means for a woman to be in her prime. For these reasons and more, e.l.f. Cosmetics has tapped Coolidge for its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, with the script co-written by The White Lotus creator Mike White. The ad finds Coolidge sampling (and sticking with) the brand’s viral Power Grip Primer, the glowy, grippy formula transforming the actor, in her own words, into a “baby dolphin.”
The collaboration makes sense in more ways than one. Not only is Coolidge in her prime, she’s also a longtime advocate for veganism and cruelty-free products, which are values that e.l.f. shares, too. “A lot of the lines sort of fake you out, and when you really read between the lines you realize that they aren’t completely cruelty-free,” says Coolidge, who coordinates with makeup artists to ensure that products used for her red carpet or event looks are in keeping with her principles. “The thing I love about the e.l.f. stuff—it really is like, vegan. And it’s extremely affordable.”
Coolidge also notes that the brand’s brushes are ideal for application, and she should know: Before embarking on her acting career, Coolidge attended the Joe Blasco School in Los Angeles, studying special effects, fashion, and beauty (a curriculum that included a mortuary makeup class, sans cadavers). “I sort of thought that maybe I’d be a makeup artist, but I was not the best in the class, and who wants to be sort of mediocre at something if you pick that as a career?” Fortunately for us and our dopamine levels, Coolidge followed the acting path, but she picked up some tricks during her beauty days.
“If you have dark under your eyes, like black or blue, you can actually mix orange makeup in with your concealer, and it will completely cover the blue, or yellow to cover redness,” she says. “Now everyone is on TikTok showing you how you can cut your face in half and give yourself a different jawline.” Coolidge is a huge fan of TikTok beauty tutorials—as well as modern beauty’s eschewal of etiquette.
“The way girls are doing their faces now—there are no rules,” she says. “You can do things out of order, and there are all these glowy creams. You can leave your table at a restaurant and be like, ‘Oh my god I look like I’ve been run over,’ and there’s some sort of glowy primer or cream you can kind of put on your already made-up face and kind of change the way you look, like put some life back in your face, in a short amount of time.”
Though Coolidge favors looks that lean more natural than overdone, she cops to a love of lashes, liner, sculpting contour, and the ritual of putting makeup on in general. “I think it’s very therapeutic, and sometimes I’m bummed when it’s over.” Fans of The White Lotus (and Coolidge’s Tanya) certainly know the feeling….
