Many celebrities drop bikini photos just because. But Blake Lively shared her red bikini photo dump last night with a greater business purpose: to promote her line of non-alcoholic mixers, Betty Buzz. The actress posed with her drinks while wearing various colored visors in the ad campaign, shot by Guy Aroch. She previously teased the campaign with a bikini shot here.
On her Instagram Story, Lively dropped more images and brought her husband Ryan Reynolds into the conversation. “This is not a capture of a wild mating ritual (though it could be),” she wrote. “I legitimately chug @bettybuzz Meyer Lemon all day. Every day. I am our number one customer. I respect our customer’s privacy so I won’t reveal @vancityreynolds [Ryan Reynolds’ Instagram handle] is our number 2 customer.”
Lively famously doesn’t drink alcohol. She spoke about launching Betty Buzz to Forbes in May 2022. “I spent three years building this company, from custom tooling the bottles to the flavors,” she said. “I had no interest in just like slapping my name on someone else’s brand. If I was going to build something, I wanted to build it because there’s nothing else out there like it and I wanted it to be the absolute best it could be, better than anything I had tried. I have the unfair advantage of having a very loud megaphone, but I can only sell one bottle that way and the drink itself has to sell the rest of the bottles. In less than seven months, we sold 2.5 million bottles—that’s over 100 thousand cases and that’s with no marketing, so it has been pretty cool to see that.”
She also mentioned how Reynolds’ own gin company led to her launching her own brand. “The idea of Betty Buzz came out of a partnership in the first place. My husband has a gin company. I was the at-home mixologist. I’m always making drinks for people. I don’t drink. I will sample a drink if I’m making somebody a beverage with alcohol—I’ll taste it to make sure that it tastes good, but the mixers that were available to me were things that I would not drink unless they were doused with alcohol. So, the idea came from our partnership. I mean, everything we do, we do together, for better or worse.”
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.