Despite Lindsay Lohan’s rather limited filmography, it hasn’t stopped her from continually homing in on the main three movies that launched her into the spotlight—The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday and Mean Girls—as premises/allusions in her various brand deals over the years. And, if not referencing one of those movies, Lohan has always been able finagle a brand partnership by making fun of her party girl past. She did as much in 2015 with an Esurance commercial, in 2018 for a brief stint as lawyer.com’s spokesperson and again in 2022 with an ad for Planet Fitness that was sure to play up how healthy and vital she is now. So “vital,” in fact, that she still needs to do commercials because of how few and far between the film roles are (and no, one isn’t counting her “Netflix comeback” with Falling For Christmas and Irish Wish).
This much was further emphasized again in 2022 when she released yet another ad that paid Mean Girls homage galore, this time for a shoe brand: Allbirds. Then, in 2023, she went back to Mean Girls again via a Peter Thomas Roth ad that found her playing a “customer service representative” (a.k.a. herself wearing a headset) to answer the call of a woman asking, “What can Peter Thomas Roth eye patches help me with?” In reply, Lohan gushes, “Hydration, depuffing, anti-aging…the limit does not exist!” Nor does the limit exist for the amount of products that Lohan will shill while simultaneously hammering home the point that the height of her movie career was in the 2000s (even though The Parent Trap came out in 1998). The Mean Girls milking didn’t stop that year either, with Lohan really going for broke (a.k.a. money) via a Wal-Mart commercial that would be as close as she could get to a sequel (something she had been blabbing about for years on various talk shows, only to be saddled with an embarrassing cameo in the eventual movie version of the Broadway musical).
In her latest to bid to remind people of her relevance by recalling the past (something Lohan’s longtime frenemy, Paris Hilton, is defter at), Lohan concedes to riff on The Parent Trap for a Nexxus hair product commercial titled “The Style Swap”—surely, you get the similarity in title. Obviously, this is because Mean Girls is too exhausted by now and she’s waiting to release the sequel to Freaky Friday (Freakier Friday) before she starts fully milking that again, too. Hence, reverting to The Parent Trap, her very first feature. After all, not many people are going to get a Just My Luck or even Life-Size reference. So that leaves a concept that starts with Lohan sitting at her vanity as someone calls from offscreen, “Lindsay! Ready to go?” “Give me five,” she calls back. Gazing into the mirror, she then “muses,” “Hmm, who do I wanna be today? I’m feeling twinspired…but, as I always say, let the hair decide.”
She then has a “fantasy” of two hairstyles meant to embody the personality types of Hallie Parker and Annie James, the twins separated at birth in The Parent Trap who end up reuniting at the same summer camp. While Annie is a polished and sophisticated Londoner, Hallie is a loose, casual California girl. Thus, Nexxus takes advantage of the hairstyle “contrasts” by showcasing one version of Lohan in a slicked-back ponytail narrating, “Do I wanna go understated with a sleek pony?” She then saturates her hair with a “slick stick” (not suggestive at all) and declares, “The Nexxus slick stick is my go-to” before breaking the fourth wall and asking (in Annie’s British accent), “Where was this in the 90s?”
The Hallie persona then enters the picture by way of Lohan lying on her back (no stranger to said position) on the bed with a deck of cards fanned out in her hands—an automatic callback to the poker scene in The Parent Trap. She muses, “Do I wanna go bold with hair as big as my personality?” “Hallie” then douses her tresses with a spray and explains, “This Nexxus XXL hairspray gives me major volume.” It’s at this point that she stares into a Beauty and the Beast-like hand mirror and tells herself, “You never looked better.” This being what amounts to an almost exact re-creation of what she does in the Peter Thomas Roth commercial with a hand mirror, also telling herself, “Honey, you never looked better.” Unless this is just her new occasional catchphrase (à la Paris Hilton with “sliving”), it seems ill-advised to use it in commercials for two separate brands. But then, Lohan is known for being somewhat sloppy.
Winking at the camera after repeating what she already did for Peter Thomas Roth, she’s then joined in the next scene by her “twinspirations,” with ponytailed Annie insisting, “Well, I think the choice here is obvious.” Hallie chimes in, “Yep, very obvious. Have you ever seen hair this bouncy?” The “real” Lindsay then announces, “I have a beyond brilliant idea [this being a Hallie quote from the movie]. Sorry girls, you’re dismissed.” Snapping her fingers, she disappears the two and proceeds to meld the best of both styles while cringily continuing her narration with, “Brat summer is over. Flawless fall is now.”
And, apparently, “flawless fall” means looking like Meredith Blake (Elaine Hendrix)—oversized black hat (granted, Meredith’s wasn’t that oversized) and white dress included—instead of either one of her twin selves. When Lohan finally shows herself to the person who was waiting for her, someone intended to be her daughter, one presumes, the girl says of her overdressed appearance, “I thought we were just going to the grocery store.” Lohan shrugs, “We are.”
Now out on the sidewalk in front of her brownstone (how Carrie Bradshaw), Lohan looks at the camera again and instructs, “Darling, always live like the cameras are watching” (because, frankly, they are—and who remembers that better than the formerly-stalked-by-the-paparazzi Lohan?). This being a statement more in line with her Lola Steppe character from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Perhaps the next movie that Lohan will resort to referencing in a commercial, since Mean Girls and The Parent Trap are growing increasingly stale and there are few things that the I Know Who Killed Me storyline could work for in terms of advertising (even though that story, too, involves twins separated at birth).
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