Pamela Anderson Grew Her New Lip Balm: 'Couldn't Stand Lip Gloss'
She fed soup kitchens from her 15,000-square-foot garden in Ladysmith, BC ... then found a wild fruit she had never planted and turned it into a $22 Sonsie balm.
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Pamela Anderson's Sonsie skincare brand dropped a limited-edition Wild Groundcherry Basic Balm on October 8 ... and the sourcing story is genuinely different. The $22 balm exists because Anderson found groundcherries growing wild in her own garden on Vancouver Island and became obsessed with them, per The Zoe Report.
"I thought it was a tomatillo, with the little paper baskets around the little tomatoes, and when I tried one, I was like, 'Wow, that's not a tomato. That's a cherry,'" she told The Zoe Report. "It's a really earthy, interesting fruit. So I've been obsessed with them."
That garden is not a photo-shoot prop. The Arcady estate in Ladysmith, British Columbia, where Anderson returned in 2020, runs about seven acres. Her vegetable garden spans roughly 15,000 square feet in a Provençal layout she describes as wildflowers, herbs, and vegetables growing together, and its harvest goes to local food banks, soup kitchens, and neighbors, as well as to her kitchen, per Grazia USA.
The Anti-Gloss That Started on a Film Set
Anderson's entry into beauty ran through a specific complaint. She spent years on sets being handed sticky lip gloss and hating it. "I couldn't stand lip gloss," she has said in multiple interviews. When she joined Sonsie as co-founder and majority owner in 2024, the brief she brought was a hydrating balm that would not feel like petroleum-flavored tape on her lips.
The Wild Groundcherry version is built around 25 percent bio-based squalane and a 1 percent hydrating peptide complex. It adds a warm golden shimmer without microplastics or conventional glitter, per the Page Six summary reported by AllYouCanFind. Stock is intentionally limited: "We only made so many, and then those will be gone," she said.
This is the second limited-edition flavor in the line. The first, a rhubarb balm, launched in November 2024. Both flavors came from the same Arcady garden. "I feel like a little fairy in my garden," Anderson told The Zoe Report. "I always say I'm Sonsie's garden fairy godmother."
Why the Ingredient Story Actually Matters
Most celebrity beauty brands run in the opposite direction: identify a category with margin, hire a contract manufacturer, attach the name. Anderson's version at least starts with a real-life obsession and a working garden that predates the brand by years. The no-makeup move that went viral in 2024 was correctly read as image rehabilitation after decades of Hollywood glam requirements. What it also was, less obviously, is the backstory that makes a natural, ingredient-led beauty brand coherent on Anderson's terms.
The question for Sonsie is whether the sourcing story scales. A 15,000-square-foot garden on Vancouver Island can produce enough groundcherries to inspire a flavor. It cannot supply a commercial production run. The brand will have to find a supply chain that holds up the same story as volume grows. So far the answer has been limited editions, which sidestep the problem by design.
She put it more simply in The Zoe Report. The groundcherry "was something that surprised me in my garden, so when talking about new flavors for the lip balms, I thought, 'Everyone likes to be surprised.' So that's it."
Ad Watch News is an independent commentary site with no affiliation with Pamela Anderson, Sonsie, or any retailer mentioned here. We cover celebrity news and the business of attention.
Sources & further reading
- The Zoe Report: Pamela Anderson on Sonsie Basic Balm Wild Groundcherry (October 2026)
- AllYouCanFind (Page Six): Pamela Anderson 'couldn't stand' lip gloss, so she made something better (October 2026)
- Grazia USA: Pamela Anderson Reveals Her Breathtaking Vancouver Island Garden (2026)
- Wikimedia Commons: Pamela Anderson at The Last Showgirl Q&A, London, February 2025 (Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0)
