Adriana Lima never planned any of it. As a schoolgirl in Salvador, Bahia, she wanted to be a pediatrician, and she has said that before Victoria's Secret came along she seriously considered becoming a nun. She entered her first modeling contest only because a school friend refused to go alone. Lima sent in photos to keep her company — and it was Lima the organizers called back.
From Salvador to Anna Sui
Born on June 12, 1981, in the Castelo Branco neighborhood of Salvador, Lima was raised by her mother, a social worker, after her father, a carpenter, left when she was six months old. At 15 she won Ford's "Supermodel of Brazil" search and took second place in the worldwide Ford contest the following year. By 1997 she was in New York with Elite Model Management, making her runway debut at Anna Sui's September show. Her first magazine cover, Marie Claire Brazil, came in 1998. She identifies as Afro-Brazilian and speaks four languages: Portuguese, English, Italian and Spanish. One thing she doesn't have is a middle name. "Francesca," repeated across the press for years, was a myth she personally debunked on W Radio in 2010.
The Longest-Serving Angel
Lima walked her first Victoria's Secret show in 1999, at seventeen. Contracted as an Angel in 2000, she missed only one show in the next two decades (2009, for her first pregnancy) and opened the show five times, including in 2012, less than two months after giving birth to her second daughter. She wore the Fantasy Bra three times; the 2008 version, set with 3,575 black diamonds and valued at over $5 million, remains one of the most extravagant ever made. In 2017 the analytics firm D'Marie, compiling 24 social-media metrics, named her the most valuable Angel of them all.
Her farewell came on November 8, 2018, after 18 shows, with a letter posted to Facebook: "Thank you for showing me the world, sharing your secrets, and most importantly not just giving me wings but teaching me to fly." The brand answered with an on-show tribute titled "Thank You Adriana." It wasn't goodbye for long. She returned to the relaunched show in 2024 and walked again in 2025, her twentieth appearance.
Two Super Bowl Ads in One Night
Lima's 2008 Victoria's Secret Super Bowl spot was the single most-watched ad of the game, seen by 103.7 million people. Four years later she became the only celebrity ever to front two Super Bowl commercials in the same game, for Teleflora and Kia. The Kia spot did real work: Optima sales jumped 138.6% that February, and its teaser premiered in movie theaters first, believed to be a first for a Super Bowl ad. Brands noticed the pattern. When Turkey's Mavi Jeans signed her in 2012, quarterly sales rose 50%.
The Work Beyond the Wings
Victoria's Secret made her famous, but the client list runs far deeper. Lima became a GUESS? girl in 2000, then the face of Maybelline New York — a relationship that ran from 2003 to 2009 and resumed in 2014. The campaign roll call since reads like a fashion-week schedule: De Beers, Bulgari, Donna Karan, IWC watches opposite Karolina Kurkova, Marc Jacobs' Decadence fragrance, Miu Miu, Chopard and Puma. Barcelona's Desigual went further and made her the brand's first-ever global ambassador for its 30th anniversary. And when Telecom Italia Mobile put her in its commercials, the Italian press nicknamed her "the Catherine Zeta-Jones of Italy."
The covers kept pace. After Marie Claire Brazil came her first Vogue covers in 2000, then Harper's Bazaar, ELLE, W and V — and Esquire, where for the magazine's 75th anniversary in 2008 she re-created Angie Dickinson's classic 1966 cover. She appeared in the 2005 Pirelli Calendar, sat for Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel and Mario Testino, and beyond the Victoria's Secret stage walked runways for Givenchy, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Alexander McQueen and Valentino. When Jason Wu cast her for his Fall 2014 campaign, he explained the choice simply: "She's like our own Bianca Jagger."
Earnings and Net Worth
Forbes tracked her among the world's highest-paid models for years: fourth in 2012 with $7.3 million, then second in the world from 2014 through 2016, peaking at $10.5 million. Maybelline alone reportedly paid around $3 million a year during her spokesmodel runs. Wealth trackers such as Celebrity Net Worth put her fortune at roughly $95 million — an estimate she has never confirmed, but one that two decades at the top of the industry makes easy to believe.
"An Athlete's Mind"
Lima has been unusually candid about the work behind the image. Before the 2011 show she told The Daily Telegraph she spent nine days on protein shakes and cut liquids entirely for the final twelve hours ("you can lose up to eight pounds just from that") while training twice a day. The admission drew criticism, and her answer to E! was blunt: "I just have an athlete's mind... After this show, I become normal again." The "Adriana Lima diet" went on to become one of the web's five most-searched diets in 2012.
The discipline has a second outlet: boxing. Lima has trained for more than a decade and calls the sport her passion. "Boxing as a woman really empowered me," she told CNN Style in 2016 — adding, only half-joking, that if she were not a model she would probably be a boxer: "If anything happens with the modeling career, I know what to do." For one Vogue Brasil shoot she posed in a Rio favela, at an organization that teaches local kids to box — boxing, fashion and Brazil in a single frame.
Even her signature pose — chin dipped, eyes flicked up — was not invented for a camera. It was her childhood sulking face: whenever she was upset, she told People, her mother knew it from that exact look. Decades later, the same expression became one of the most recognized in fashion.
The other constant is faith. A devout Catholic who attends Mass every Sunday, she told GQ in 2006, on what became the magazine's best-selling issue of the year, that she would remain a virgin until marriage: "Sex is for after marriage." A decade later she told Ocean Drive she still reads a Bible backstage before shows, and on social media she pays tribute to Yemanjá, the Yoruba water spirit of her native Bahia.
Off the Runway
Her screen debut came in The Follow (2001), a short film directed by Wong Kar-wai for BMW, alongside Mickey Rourke, Forest Whitaker and Clive Owen. She played herself on How I Met Your Mother and Ugly Betty, made a cameo in Ocean's 8, and in 2017 hosted and executive-produced Lifetime's American Beauty Stars. NBC made her a food-and-culture correspondent for the Rio 2016 Olympics. In 2013 she became the first pregnant woman ever photographed for the Pirelli Calendar, and in 2015 Madame Tussauds unveiled her wax figure, making her the first Victoria's Secret Angel there and only the second Brazilian, after Pelé. Away from the cameras she has spent years supporting Caminhos da Luz, an orphanage in her hometown, and her 2009 winnings from the Turkish version of Deal or No Deal went to a children's leukemia hospital in Istanbul.
Private Life
Lima's relationships are well documented. She was engaged to singer Lenny Kravitz (2001–2003) and appeared in his video for "Yesterday Is Gone (My Dear Kay)"; she later dated Prince Wenzeslaus of Liechtenstein. On Valentine's Day 2009 she married Serbian NBA player Marko Jarić in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; they raised two daughters and divorced in 2016. She has been with film producer Andre Lemmers since 2021. Their son was born in August 2022, and in December 2024 she announced on Instagram that they had married, signing off as "Mrs Lima Lemmers." As of 2025 she lives in Los Angeles.
Where She Is Now
In April 2025, The Daily Front Row named her Fashion Comeback of the Year. Twenty-six years after a teenager from Salvador walked her first show, Lima is still walking, on her own terms.