If your social media algorithms are anything like mine, you’ve likely been seeing a lot of outrage at Neutrogena over the past few days. The skincare brand is in the crossfire of a true tragedy: the death of actress Hayden Panettiere at 36 years old.
How did Neutrogena get involved? If you turned on a TV at any point in the 2000s, you probably remember Panettiere smiling and splashing her face with water on behalf of the skincare brand. The star of
Heroes was an it-girl of the decade, with one of the most prominent brand deals of the era. But in 2015, Panettiere spoke about her experience with postpartum depression in an interview with Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan. “There’s a lot of misunderstanding, and I feel like there’s a lot of people out there who think that it’s not real,” she
said on air. She didn’t plan to talk about the topic. It came up because her character on
Nashville was struggling with postpartum depression at the time; Panettiere also said the show’s writers
often pulled from her real life. “I was just being honest,” she said earlier this year.
While on book tour in the spring, Panettiere said that Neutrogena attempted to fire her, claiming her disclosure violated the morality clause in her contract. As a teen star, Panettiere had been trailed by paparazzi through all kinds of exploits—and was shocked it was her frank discussion of postpartum depression that caused Neutrogena to pull out the morality clause. She said her agent told the brand it was “illegal” to fire her over this, and that stopped an immediate dismissal. But when her next renewal cycle came up, she was dropped.
Panettiere disclosed all of this in May, when she published her memoir
This Is Me: A Reckoning. It was one story among many, as Panettiere discussed
her history with addiction, depression, and
her painful decision to give up custody of her daughter. The Neutrogena story made some waves in the spring—but it’s only now, after the tragedy of Panettiere’s death, that it’s really gaining steam. There are calls to boycott Neutrogena, and the brand’s comments sections on its recent Instagram posts are flooded.
When a celebrity dies too young after battling addiction, people look for answers—or somewhere to cast blame. And for many, right now that target is Neutrogena. The other systems that played a role in Panettiere’s struggles—
child stardom, predatory figures in Hollywood—are too unwieldy to narrow down to a single villain.
When Panettiere spoke about postpartum depression in 2015, the general response was largely supportive. It had been a decade since Tom Cruise said that postpartum depression wasn’t a real condition and attacked Brooke Shields for taking medication; surely things had changed?
Vogue said
she changed the perception of postpartum depression. HuffPost highlighted how she told other moms
they weren’t alone.
But business can be slow to catch up to culture. Neutrogena was part of Johnson & Johnson at the time; in 2023, J&J spun out its consumer health business as Kenvue. (Kenvue hasn’t responded to
Fortune‘s request for comment, and hasn’t commented on this at all this week or back in May.) Neutrogena is currently the largest brand in Kenvue’s $4.12 billion-in-revenue skin health and beauty segment.
Today, brands have no choice but to respond quickly to consumers, who can change a brand’s perception with a single TikTok. Panettiere’s 2015 interview was at the dawn of the 2.0 era of social media—when the going Instagram aesthetic was still perfection, rather than TikTok relatability. And that’s what a mass brand likely wanted in its spokesperson.
The irony is that in sharing her experience with postpartum depression, Panettiere helped usher in an era in which talking about such things was acceptable—and even normal. She didn’t have armies of commenters in her corner to defend her at the time, but they’re here now.
Emma Hinchliffeemma.hinchliffe@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.
