On a recent afternoon, Cat Pierce, a musician and artist, stood in the living room of her East Los Angeles home negotiating with her 4-year-old, Lenora, a.k.a. “Lenny,” about going to the park with her father, Stephen Werner. But Lenny burst into tears at the prospect of leaving the house without her mom.
“I spent $100,000 to get pregnant,” said Pierce, 48, after they left. “Then when I was pregnant I was like, What have I done?! I don’t function well on no sleep — this is a huge mistake! But it’s funny, now I do function well on no sleep. You get this power.”
For Pierce, that power manifested in starting a thriving beauty business:Omen, the cosmetics line she and her husband started in 2022. “Before, I would be like, I need nine hours,” she said. “Now I’m like, four hours and let’s start a beauty line!”
This girlboss-meets-earth-mother life, where you start a family with a hunky younger husband in a beautiful California bungalow, may seem like a predictable route for a golden girl like Pierce. She arrived in New York from Alabama in the late 1990s, with a face like Brigitte Bardot and the personality of a profane Goldie Hawn. As one half of the Pierces, the moody indie-pop duo she formed with her sister Allison, she became a major fixture in the NME tabloid culture during a period that also included her five-year relationship with Albert Hammond Jr. of the Strokes.
But when her 40th birthday approached in 2017, Pierce found herself alone — the Pierces had gone on hiatus after her brief marriage ended in divorce. “That was a huge shock to my system. It sent me completely reeling,” she said. “But it also set me free.”
Last year, Pierce posted a video that helped her change course. In it, she stood in her living room, rattling off the highlights of her life since everything imploded. She met her current husband, Werner, at 40; started Omen at 42; gave birth to Lenny at 44; and bought her first house at 45.
“Keep going!” she wrote. “Your worth has no expiration date.”
The post resonated with people because in the past year, Pierce has gained more than 320,000 followers, and her page is now logging six million to 10 million monthly viewers. That exposure has drawn the attention of investors who have expressed interest in buying Omen. In August, Hay House will publish The Omen Oracle, her hand-painted tarot deck and guide that follows The Wandering Star deck she released in 2021. She is currently at work on her first book, which she describes as “somewhere between a juicy memoir and a self-help book.” And, by her followers’ request, this month she is launching a series of online coaching courses on relationships, aging and creativity.
Pierce is positioning herself as the free spirit amid a cohort that includes the actresses Naomi Watts, Halle Berry and Gwyneth Paltrow — all in their 50s — who have started wellness and self-help businesses by reframing aging as a power move. But the role she’s stepping into is less focused on being the face of a middle-aged hipster, and more on being an emotional lifestyle guru with great makeup tips. While her audience seeks her counsel on what to wear and what to put on their skin, increasingly they want her guidance on shaping their inner lives.
Is She for Real?
It feels risky to enter Pierce’s home, the set for all her hopeful videos. What if she is not as goofy as she seems on Instagram? What if all the great vintage clothes she claims she got for a song are actually expensive?
What if she’s just another late-stage capitalist influencer?
Inside her home, the walls and furniture — all saturated earth tones, like marigold and pumpkin — match Pierce, who is wearing a small vest and a pair of high-waisted slacks, both from Cheerio Collective, one of her favorite vintage neighborhood shops. She’s warm, but not weird. Up close, she even has wrinkles.
Her next-door neighbors are Allison Pierce and her husband, Benjamin Mathes, and their 2-year-old daughter, Emmylou. Lenny and Emmylou are not just cousins, they are half sisters: Their mothers used the same egg donor.
“We call them sister cousins,” Pierce said, cackling, her Southern accent still pronounced.
The Pierces had an unusual childhood. They and their youngest sister, Louisa, were home-schooled by their parents, who were hippies and founders of the first vegetarian restaurant in Alabama. The girls grew up with two older half siblings in a domestic art colony.
“We moved a lot. There was some chaos, there was some generational pain, but they loved us. And they were like, We wanted to be artists, you guys do whatever you want, creatively,” Pierce said. “People talk about creative blocks, but I’ve never experienced that because we were just told there’s a never-ending channel, and you tap into it and that’s it.”
And the girls did so. Cat and Allison started performing together as teenagers in Birmingham and got signed to a Christian label, Word Records, in Nashville in 1998. The label “subtly inquired about our virginity,” Pierce said, “then eventually deemed us to be too secular and passed us on to Epic.” The Pierces’ goal had never been to soar to Christian or country pop fame; it was to move to New York, so they regrouped.
In 1994, Cat Pierce moved to Manhattan for the summer to dance with the School of American Ballet. She immediately fell in love with the city, she said — and with the new sensation of being noticed by men for the first time. The combo “was like a drug.”
By the summer of 2001, Cat and Allison were living in New York full time, performing as an indie duo, the Pierces, and pairing their moody melodies with elaborate Southern noir visuals. The band eventually played stadiums, opening for Coldplay, and had songs featured on soapy cable TV shows like “Roswell.” But when “Secret” was chosen as the theme song for the teen thriller “Pretty Little Liars” and its 2022 spinoff, “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin,” the Pierces had a huge hit on their hands.
“We’ve lived off that song for 20 years,” Pierce said.
By 2011, the Pierces were touring a lot, but things had begun to wind down. Pierce was in a relationship with Christian Langdon, a producer and musician, and they moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and married the following year. Pierce recalled being at her desk on the computer in search of a new OB-GYN after struggling to get pregnant when Langdon told her they had to talk.
“He was like, You’re not happy and neither am I,” she said. Pierce was stunned but, in retrospect, shouldn’t have been. “We loved each other and we had good times, but we never had a physical connection.” They divorced in 2016.
Finding Her Place
Even during the peak of her pop career, Pierce battled with whether she belonged onstage. There was a part of her that never felt comfortable there. So when she moved to Los Angeles, the band went on indefinite hiatus.
Music had been what paid Pierce’s bills, but after she stopped touring she realized she “didn’t have the nervous system for it,” she said. There were other things she wanted to do: painting, drawing, dancing. She also worried she didn’t deserve the very spotlight she sought — a feeling of not-enough-ness that has become a recurring theme in her new work.
Pierce said that becoming a devotee of ayahuasca and other plant medicines helped extricate her personally from this psychic logjam. Allison Pierce sat for an ayahuasca ceremony and pronounced it the worst experience of her life — which elicited Cat Pierce’s curiosity. She knew she had to try it.
And she felt the ceremony gave her clarity on how to bring coherence to her magpie creative impulses, receiving one clear directive: “Spread messages of love.” Three days later Pierce posted the first of her viral videos. Within a matter of hours she had tens of thousands of new followers, most of them women, many reaching out to her directly for counsel. “I went through all these dark relationships and I often look back and think, what was the purpose of that? Like, I had a pretty happy childhood — creative family, lots of love, siblings,” Pierce said. “I think it’s because I carry the wound I can see in other people. I think the stuff I went through I now carry as medicine.”
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