Jessica Alba covers the new issue of Glamour, likely to promote The Honest Company. I’m actually surprised and impressed that Alba has made the company work and that she’s stuck with it – The Honest Company is her “thing” now, not so much with acting. Anyway, I like the photos from Glamour, although they’re a little bland (too much white). Alba is super-pretty. Some highlights from the Glamour piece, where she discusses feminism, religion and nudity:

Why she won’t do nudity in films: “I don’t want my grandparents to see my boobs. That’s it. It would be weird at Christmas. And, I mean, really, if you look at the movies I have done, getting naked would never ‘elevate’ the picture.”

She belonged to a very conservative church when she was small: “I was like, ‘These are not my people.’ My parents did the best they could with what they had. They were just trying to survive. I was raised by my grandparents and my parents—my grandmother was a very religious Catholic, and my parents became born-again Christians later. So that was hard-core. It’s very different than how [my children are] being raised. I was into God. I really went for it, man. Like, in the IE—the Inland Empire, outside L.A., where all the smog blows—they want to save your soul. The further I got into it, it wasn’t for me. But I’m very close to my family [today]. Church gave me that enlightenment, that there’s something bigger than yourself. I’m still connected to a spiritual thing, just not that.”

Feminism: “Where I was from, you had to answer to a man if he was the breadwinner. My mom told me that didn’t need to be the case for me—I didn’t need to rely on a man. She taught me how to hustle. I was determined to be financially independent. So I started making my own money when I was 12 [with acting]. That was freedom.”

A childhood full of pneumonia, appendectomy, asthma, allergies: “That’s what really inspired me to start Honest. I had so many health issues, and come hell or high water, my kids were going to be as healthy as possible. My life was tough as a kid. I was so lonely. And I felt really disconnected from my friends because I spent so much time in the hospital with grown-ups and felt like a weirdo. It’s a strange way to spend your time as a kid. All you want to do is play.”

Advice for Reese Witherspoon on her lifestyle brand: “Good luck, man. But, hey, the more women doing this, the better. Seventy percent of the household income is controlled by women, so it’s about time women are creating businesses for other women.”

[From Glamour]

Alba has grown up a lot, hasn’t she? The Jessica Alba from 2009-10 would have said something bitchy about the quality of work she was offered when she was talking about film nudity (as it is, I still think “getting naked would never ‘elevate’ the picture” was sort of shady). She would have said something bitchy about Reese Witherspoon, or made some sweeping generalization about religion. As for Alba’s feminism… I’m cool with it. Economic feminism is how we’re going to get more and more people on board the Feminism Train. Feminism = economic power.

Photos courtesy of Glamour.