Jessica Alba and Cash Warren, who share three children, have split up after 16 years of marriage. But it was building their family that inspired her to start the Honest Company.

Jessica Alba said that one of the secrets to her enduring marriage with Cash Warren was their mutual commitment to “being in it.”

As she told Rachel Zoe and then-husband Rodger Berman on their Works for Us podcast in 2021, “The second you can choose to be in it, is when you’re like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know, I can probably choose to not do this anymore.’ The second that happens, that’s when it gets weird.”

It’s unclear when exactly it got weird after that, but Alba and Warren have split up after 16 years of marriage, TMZ reported Jan. 8. While they’d been dogged by divorce rumors off and on for years, let alone in recent weeks, the split news comes just days after a family outing to Universal Studios with daughters Honor, 16, and Haven, 13, and son Hayes, 7.

Naturally their kids remain their No. 1 priority, Alba and Warren remaining partners in parenting if not romance. But it’s their family that redefined the actress’ purpose in life and, without it, who knows where her journey would have taken her.

“I think there’s two types of people that want to be in Hollywood, especially in front of the camera,” the L.A.’s Finest star said on a March 2020 episode of The Sakara Life podcast. “There are people who are like, ‘Look at me, I’m fabulous and amazing!’ And then there are the people who are like me, why I did it is I just wanted to be somebody else.”

And the money didn’t hurt, either. “Just the straight-up financial independence side of it,” Alba added, “allowed me to not feel so beholden to my family’s ideas around who I had to be and how I had to operate in the world.”

Feeling stifled by the lack of communication and strict religious atmosphere at home that wasn’t really her cup of tea, the California native started auditioning when she was 11 and made her movie debut at 13 in the 1994 comedy Camp Nowhere. 

It wasn’t too long before she was everywhere, landing Dark Angel when she was 19, coming in at No. 1 on Maxim‘s Hot 100 list in 2001 and scoring dual badass roles in Fantastic Four and Sin City, both of which came out in 2005.

All of which proved a means to an end, the work much more fun when once she knew she never had to act again if she didn’t want to.

“I felt like I couldn’t breathe and having that financial independence allowed me then to start looking inside and working on myself,” she explained to The Sakara Life‘s Danielle Dubois. “Without the independence, I didn’t even have the space [to visualize bigger dreams]. So for me I had the goal, I got to achieve it, and that’s where my inner work started.”

The Honest work, if you will.

By the time she was ready to return to acting after kicking the profession down many rungs on the priority ladder, she had three kids and was the hands-on founder and chairperson of The Honest Company, the clean-product brand she founded in 2011 that was valued at $550 million in 2022.

After devoting her life to her acting since she was a kid, “she poured her heart and soul into Honest, and poured her love into Honest,” Warren said on Works for Us in 2021. “And that was giving her that love back, and she was very much able to treat Hollywood like a transactional business.”

By then, however, it was “almost flipped,” Warren noted. “While Honest still has her heart, it very much is a business. And now she’s gone back to acting, she rediscovered that joy, and rediscovered that love for acting again.”

And Warren had a front-row seat to Alba’s journey from Maxim cover girl and ass-kicking action hero to mom to increasingly frustrated actor to determined idea woman who didn’t rest until her dream of a company that made products free of potentially harmful chemicals turned into a reality.

They first got together when Alba was shooting Fantastic Four in Vancouver and Warren was an assistant to the director, Tim Story. One of Warren’s tasks was to take a bunch of photos of the actress trying on contact lenses that would give her Sue Storm’s blue eyes—and he decided to just go for it.

“I went into her trailer and I was taking pictures and flirting with her and trying to strike up a conversation and trying to be friends with her,” he admitted. For about a month, they’d go out regularly in a group with other actors and crew members until, one night, Warren surprised her with dinner plans for two.

Or, as Alba recalled to their pals Zoe and Berman, “He tricked me into going on a date with him because I thought it was going to be, like, the group night again, and then it was just him. And I was like, ‘Where’s everybody else?’ and he was like, ‘Oh, it’s just going to be us.’”

So one of her first thoughts was, “I don’t know, this is where it could get weird.”

And it did get weird, but not in the way she worried it might.

Rather, they talked for more than three hours, Warren having arranged for a private room at Tojo’s Restaurant, a high-end Japanese dining spot, where they proceeded to eat nothing despite dish after dish coming out of the kitchen.

“What happened was, is even though we had hung out and we were chill with each other, we both just started getting butterflies in our stomach and we couldn’t eat!” Alba explained. So they just drank sake and afterward they took the hour-long walk back to her hotel.

And that is when Warren lost his cool.

“I’d never had allergies in my entire life,” Warren recalled, “but for some reason, that night, we start hooking up and all of a sudden I get the craziest allergies…I’m like snotting…”

Alba interjected, “His eyes are tearing…” He continued, “You have no idea—and I sneezed in her mouth.” (Alba confirmed as much.)

“I had to go to the bathroom,” Warren remembered, “I had to talk to myself in the mirror, like, ‘What the eff is wrong with you, like why are you doing this?! Like, get your s–t together!’”

Alba said, “The allergies lasted like a month…And we proceeded to still hang out and he would stay over. We never went all the way to home base. It stayed at like second base for a hot minute. And he ate my dog’s breath mints.”

Right, so Warren, waking up after spending the night for the first time and not having a toothbrush, spied what looked like breath mints in a foil package. He popped one into his mouth and “it tasted like vomit,” he said. “And I was like, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll be back!’ and I ran out of the room. It was nothing but embarrassing moments for like a month and a half.”

Alba eventually learned from his friends and family, including Warren’s dad, Hillstreet Blues actor Michael Warren (“the smoothest person on the planet,” she said), that her new boyfriend had led a pretty charmed life as far as his luck with the ladies was concerned.

When she met him, Alba recalled, “This guy had no swag, and I only knew no-swag Cash, and it was the first time he had no game, no swag.”

But she liked that about him.

“I was not good with dating, I didn’t know how to do it, all of it, I was just like weird, insecure,” Alba said. “And so with Cash it was the first time I met someone and—I called my best friend the first day I met Cash, when he was taking the contact pictures, and I was like, ‘It’s so weird, I feel like I’ve met this guy before named Cash and I feel like I’m just going to know him for the rest of my life. It just feels comfortable. It feels like family.’”

They were together for four years before Alba broke up with him. (Though Warren remembered it going the other way.)

“I was always a pretty confident person in my own, kind of walking my own path and really happy there,” Warren said on Whine Down with Jana Kramer in 2023, admitting he’d been acting like an “a–hole” when they split up. “And next thing you know, I’m looking up and feeling jealous all the time.”

Yet during what proved an action-packed six weeks, he moved in with an NBA player in Malibu and “he hooked up with everything,” Alba told Zoe and Berman, referring wryly to her ex getting lost in the “bone zone” during the time they were apart.

“I was trying to trade while my stock was high,” Warren quipped.

After a “soul-searching trip” with her mom Cathy, Alba continued, she called Warren to relay that she missed him and they went out to dinner. She had to leave right away for work in Toronto, but told him she’d fly back to L.A. to see him when she had time off.

The only hitch: He was on a guys’ trip to Las Vegas when that time came, but Alba shrugged and flew to Vegas instead.

“And that’s where Honor was conceived,” Warren shared proudly.

Before welcoming their firstborn daughter, Honor Marie Warren, on June 7, 2008, they had a quickie May 19 wedding ceremony at the courthouse—mainly so she and her child would share a last name, Alba explained.

She initially planned for a grander celebration—or at least a ceremony with more guests than the security guard who waved the wand over them at the entrance and then served as a witness to their nuptials—at a later date. But then work usually called, daughter Haven Garner Warren was born Aug. 13, 2011, and Alba launched her company the following year.

“And now it’s been so long, Cash is like, ‘Why would we jinx what we have?’” Alba said.

Son Hayes Alba Warren was born Dec. 31, 2017—”a cherub,” his mom gleefully described him, while also admitting that the little angel had probably deserved more than the one 10-minute timeout he’d received in his life up till then, but as the baby of the family “we all let him get away with everything.”

Alba admitted that pandemic quarantine had at least allowed her the opportunity to be with her kids all the time, as she was pulled away more when Honor and Haven were Hayes’ age. (However, she never thought twice about bringing her babies to work, and she took pride in Honest Co’s maternity and paternity leave policies and accommodations on site, such as a designated pumping area, for moms.)

“I struggle with it all the time and I would say that, during quarantine, I felt like with Hayes, this is the first baby where I don’t feel like I missed that stage of their life,” Alba said. She was always home at the end of the day for the girls, but “I definitely feel like I missed the small moments,” and that was different from being there “with every meal, watching them grow, watching their vocabulary develop…all the good, the bad, the everything.”

Meanwhile, Cash was “having a great time,” Alba cracked of her husband’s quarantine experience, which in addition to 24/7 at-home parenting also included working out a lot (acquiring his first-ever six-pack) and brushing up on his golf game. “Lots of self-care over here,” Alba quipped.

Warren said, “I think one of the things that has allowed us to stay together so long is that we’re not together all the time, and so we were able to have some distance. She travels a lot, I travel a lot, we’re able to miss each other. Quarantine, we’re on top of each other nonstop and so even every small thing that I do probably is amplified and annoys her even more now.” 

Alba readily agreed, but they said they had a getaway date night planned for that evening, so all was well.

Asked what made them work, Warren said, “I think our friendship, truthfully! It’s so corny, but it’s true. Just the friendship, we can talk about anything, we can sit down, we can make each other laugh, we can piss each other off—just that best friend friendship, that trust.”

Alba added, “Yeah, like, ride or die. We’re in it. We both committed to being in it. The second you can choose to be in it, is when you’re like, ‘Hmm, I don’t know, I can probably choose to not do this anymore.’ The second that happens, that’s when it gets weird.”

And, Warren noted, they were helping each other grow.

“The moment one becomes stagnant and the other one’s really pushing for growth, it’s challenging,” he said. “Or if you’re growing apart, it’s really challenging and so, it’s like finding a way to support each other on our own paths, in our own growth. Her helping me on my path, and it doesn’t mean our paths have to converge and we have to be doing the exact same thing. It’s just supporting each other in our own growth.”

Alba was in the thick of her first go-round as one of Hollywood’s hottest stars when she started dating Warren—but she was growing increasingly disillusioned with the whole thing, from the constant focus on her looks (she worked out constantly and denied herself in the food department, figuring, as she said on The Sakara Life, “being physically miserable is part of the gig”) to the ridiculousness of when she was advised that she was probably finished at 27 after becoming a mom.

“You’re constantly scrutinized, you’re constantly told you’re not enough…everything that you see me in, you don’t realize the thousands of rejections,” she said on Works for Us. “I was wildly insecure as an actress and I would say…it becomes so superficial, and like no matter how much you bring to the table, how professional you are—because it isn’t about exotic locations at the end of the day.

“It’s about being able to put in an 18-hour day and…knowing your lines and hitting that mark and being on [snaps her fingers] and being consistent, and never being tired—and always being able to turn it on, no matter what—and also being Gumby. At the end of the day…you’ve put your heart and soul into whatever you’re doing, but at the end of the day they don’t want it.”

And when she got pregnant with Honor, Alba had an allergic reaction to a detergent, so she started researching what was in common baby products. Then it hit her, that while it was easy enough for her family to shop above and beyond for clean goods, living that life shouldn’t be so time-consuming or cost prohibitive.

“Sure, it was like, ‘good luck with that one,’” she said, recalling her three-year struggle to get her idea off the ground, including finding the investors who would take a chance on a pitch that may sound simple now but was not at all obvious then.

“So I pitched this concept and it was just too big for a lot of people,” Alba said on The Sakara Life. “Like, ‘What? You want to create what?’”

A lot of people initially took meetings with her “to take a selfie,” Alba admitted, but once she realized that the door was at least open to her, she joined forces with veterans of the branding space who would help prove in those face-to-faces that she meant business.

“It just cut through a lot of the bulls–t and it allowed me to leapfrog,” she said, “instead of getting into, ‘I’m a woman that’s never done this before,’ [but rather], ‘The financial model is here, it’s a great investment.’”

She was also heavily inspired by Warren, who had started and sold two companies by the time she was launching Honest, and he was also in the process of starting Pair of Thieves, a purveyor of men’s underwear, socks and—coincidentally in time for the rise of stay-at-home chic—loungewear. (“We got lucky with the timing of the loungewear,” he said on Rachael Ray in 2021, and the underwear continues to do exceptionally well.”)

“He has such a fearlessness,” Alba gushed to Zoe and Berman of her husband’s business acumen.

Warren also “knew how to make something [that sounded] complicated [and] distill it to something very simple in order for people to want to get onboard with his ideas.” Plus, Alba cracked, “By then I was like, ‘If this fool [can do it]…”

And much like that fool, Alba was ready to work hard.

“I can’t even tell you how many people have worked at Honest and tried to go start their own company and thought it was going to be so easy,” she said. “They don’t really understand the grit…like, literally there is [no break], you’re never not working. It’s so time consuming, what goes into it, and is the outcome really worth it?”

Kinda like how maybe you shouldn’t pursue acting just to be famous, “I think you shouldn’t start a company because you want to be on a pedestal,” Alba noted. “I think if you have to start a company because you literally can’t live another day without this thing existing, then that’s a different situation.”

And that was her: Once she became a mom, she realized she wanted more than anything to create better product options for families everywhere.

“Yeah, I was definitely told that I was done at 27 and I was like, ‘Whatever,’” Alba recalled. “I created a company and was like, ‘I’m busy anyway, guys.’”

Though being so busy, at work and with three children at home, did cut into date night time and otherwise weigh on her marriage.

“We’re just not consistent,” Alba said on Katherine Schwarzenegger‘s Before, During & After Baby Instagram series in July 2021. “But being able to communicate when you’re unhappy and nipping it right away instead of letting it sort of fester, and then you have animosity and then it explodes — which we’ve gone through that one!”

She continued, “We have, obviously, the friendship, the comfort of ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ so sometimes you don’t treat those people the best. You don’t consider their feelings in the way that you would consider other people’s feelings. That is something I think is a constant one to work on.”

Alba told People a couple months later that she and Warren tried to “over-communicate what’s happening before it gets to the point of no return.” Ultimately, she said, “We just have to check each other.”

On their wedding anniversay last May, Alba sounded like someone committed to, as she put it to Schwarzenegger, the “life journey” with Warren.

“16 years of marriage, 20 years together and forever to go… Happy Anniversary @cash_warren,” she wrote. “I’m proud of us for making it this far. There is no real set of rules or guidance that can ever prepare you for what it means to commit to another person and choose to be family. Through thick and thin we have continually found our way back to each other and have chosen one another. Cheers to us, I love you.”

They did indeed make it far, farther than most. They just couldn’t go any further.

Take a look back at Alba and Warren’s family in pictures:

Merry Christmas 2024

Jessica Alba shared this family pic featuing Cash Warren and their three kids—daughters Honor and Haven plus son Hayes—the day after the holiday.

Raiding Mom’s Closet

The couple appears with daughters at a screening of Jessica’s film Trigger Warning in June 2024.

“Honor wore my @prada dress from the 2007 premier of Valentine’s Day in London & Havie wore my @dolcegabbana dress from Comicon for Good Luck Chuck in 2010,” the actress wrote on Instagram. “I loooove seeing my girls wear some of my archived pieces and adding their own touch #FashionFriday #flashbackfriday.”

Spring Breakers

Jessica and Cash took their kids on a tropical vacation during Spring Break 2024.

Three Generations

The Sin City actress was joined by her mom Cathy Alba and her three kids on Mother’s Day 2024.

Major Swifties

The family made the whole place shimmer when they caught Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour in Los Angeles August 2023.

First Day of School

Jessica held Hayes’ hand during his first day of kindergarten in September 2023.

Kisses

Cash received sweet smooches from his daughter in this July 2016 snapshot.

One Big, Hoppy Family

“Easter with my mains,” Jessica captioned this family snapshot in April 2024. “#HappyEaster.”

Hear Me Roar

Jessica and Cash had a roarin’ good time with their kids on Halloween 2021, dressing up as lions for Hayes’ first time trick-or-treating.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

The family had a movie night for Honor’s 14th birthday in June 2022.

Baby Boy

Cash and his daughters visited Hayes in the hospital after he was born on New Year’s Eve 2017. 

GNO

Jessica had a girls’ night out with her daughters in November 2022, though her son couldn’t help but to join in on the photo fun.

Magical Memories

The Happiest Place on Earth got a whole lot happier when the family celebrated Hayes’ 6th birthday there in January 2024.

Keep on Truckin’

“This monster truck and his mechanics are trick-or-treat ready,” Jessica wrote on Halloween 2022, sharing a photo of her and Cash’s coordinating costumes with Hayes.

Academic Milestone

Honor celebrated her middle school graduation with her entire family in June 2022.

Girl Power

Jessica marked International Women’s Day 2022 with Honor and Haven, writing in part on Instagram, “As a mama of two daughters, I am constantly fighting to leave this world better than I found it – not only for them, but for every single person in the world and for the next generations of girls to come.”

Furry Friends

The family adopted dogs Dolly and Lucy—short for Lucille and Dolores—in 2022.

Fang-tastic Halloween

Jessica and Warren vamped it up with Honor and Haven in October 2017.

Aloha

Haven rang in her 5th birthday in 2016 with a tropical themed party.

(Originally published April 28, 2021, at 3 a.m. PT)

Source: www.eonline.com