Lala Milan may star on Lena Waithe’s BET hit series Boomerang, have a beloved and provocative podcast in The Salon With Lala Milan, and regularly be handpicked for awards show hosting opportunities these days, including the recent Billboard Music Awards nominations, but that hasn’t stopped her from making time to produce videos that leave the Internet in stitches. It’s the type of content that helped the 31-year-old build a name for herself online, and accumulate a large enough following that Hollywood eventually had to come calling. Consistency is key for the burgeoning star, who was working full-time in insurance not long before she started making videos and went viral in 2015.
“My drive, it was just one of those things like, ‘I don’t know what’s going to come out of this but I’m going to keep consistently producing content.’ And that’s still the motto that I go by today,” she tells ESSENCE. People are always like, ‘So, what’s next?’ I don’t know but I’m going to consistently keep producing things to find out my next step.”
And the next step isn’t resigned to just screen work, which, by the way, she’s diversifying lately by auditioning for dramatic roles. She’s also making her mark in health and wellness. This summer, Milan will release a feminine hygiene line called Vagi-taminz, selling feminine wash, suppositories, probiotics, and more. While she attributes her ability to enter seamlessly into the feminine care business to the fact that she’s a comedian and can make light of real topics, she’s serious about what she hopes to bring to the market and future customers.
“A lot of times whenever people take things so serious or it’s taboo or they’re ashamed to talk about it, I can make a joke about it and then people will be like, ‘Okay, you’re right,'” she says. “So I say that to say, feminine care is very, it’s taboo for women. I just figured out a way to basically make women comfortable in talking about it. Let’s normalize talking about issues that we have with our body that just so happen to come with having a vagina.”
In addition to helping women handle issues down there, she’s also encouraging them to embrace their bodies and improve them if they so desire to in an all-natural way. Her platform Fit Girl Bod allows people to follow her journey to gain weight when most are seeking to do the opposite. It also offers a safe space for women who’ve been told they’re “too skinny” for far too long.
“When women are slim, [people] assume that it doesn’t hurt their feelings to say certain things to them, such as, ‘What are you working out for?’ or ‘You need to eat.’ It’s equivalent to telling somebody, ‘You need to stop eating, you need to start working out,'” she says. “They don’t realize that it has the same effect on a slim person as it would a thick person.”
As a challenge to herself, she’s been doing the work, in a healthy way, to fill out, and been taking fans along for the ride with her.
“I pretty much decided that I wanted to show that gaining weight was possible, that’s one,” she says. “Something that I always got, not so much today, but on a regular basis, was ‘You’re so skinny, you need to eat.’ The typical stuff that slim people hear. And I told myself, ‘You know what? People are always talking about how they want to lose weight, let me be open and transparent with my platform about what it’s like to gain weight.'”
What started off as a passion project that admittedly took some time to commit to allowed her the chance to connect with many women who could relate to her efforts and story. Since January, the Fit Girl Bod page has amassed over 80,000 followers, creating a community.
While Milan started off as the funny girl on Vine and Instagram, she’s become so much more. As she slowly but surely makes her mark in the health and wellness industry and continues to announce her presence in entertainment, we couldn’t help but ask what’s next for her. She isn’t sure, but she’s staying busy and getting ready for the next door set to open. Remember, consistency is key.
“The way that my team is set up, the way that God has blessed me, and the way that I’m hungry, girl, I might take over the world and be president in the next couple of years,” she says. “You never know.”