Process likely to lead to job losses and store closures, and threaten source of sales for global network of small farmers and producers
When Anita Roddick sold The Body Shop in 2006, she left behind not just a thriving cosmetics and skincare empire but living proof that a business could follow strict ethical guidelines and still make healthy profits.
But on Monday, the private equity-owned company filed the intention to appoint administrators.
Continue reading...Longtime associate Peter Hawkings announced as successor after sale of brand last November to Estée Lauder
The American fashion designer Tom Ford is retiring from the eponymous brand he co-founded in 2005, after its sale to Estée Lauder last November.
Ford’s longtime associate Peter Hawkings will succeed him as creative director, while Guillaume Jesel becomes chief executive and president, taking over from Domenico de Sole, the brand’s other co-founder.
Continue reading...Cosmetics company hopes to refinance and keep trading, saying demand for products remains strong
Revlon, the 90-year-old multinational beauty company, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, weighed down by debt load, disruptions to its supply chain network and surging costs.
The New York-based company said that on court approval, it expects to receive $575m (£469m) in financing from its existing lenders, which will allow it to keep its day-to-day operations running.
Continue reading...Losing 10m followers on sites such as Instagram is a price worth paying for co-founder of ethical beauty empire
Quitting social media is hard to do, even when it doesn’t cost you anything. So when Lush’s chief executive, Mark Constantine, shut its thousands of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok accounts on Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, he knew dropping off millions of customers’ screens would damage his business.
Its Facebook and Instagram accounts alone had 10.6 million followers and the void will result in an estimated £10m hit to sales but Constantine, one of the business’s co-founders, said it had “no choice” after whistleblowers called attention to the negative impact social media sites such as Instagram are having on teenagers’ mental health.
Continue reading...The musician’s newly launched beauty brand is an extension of his trailblazing look
With Lady Gaga, Pharell Williams, and Selena Gomez all in on the act, the marker of success in 2021 is not a star on Hollywood Boulevard, it’s the launch of a beauty line. Trust Harry Styles to blow the rest out of the water.
Yesterday, the boyband star turned cultural and style juggernaut announced the launch of Pleasing – described as a “life brand”. Styles’s first business venture includes a range of nail polishes, an illuminating primer serum, and a dual-purpose eye and lip oil.
Continue reading...Celebrities at the Met Gala bejewelled their fake dark circles – but a heavy work schedule and horribly late nights will do the business for the rest of us
Name: Eye bags.
Age: As old as humanity.
Continue reading...Covid pandemic has accelerated shift to online purchases, with big brands buying up startups
The department store beauty hall is facing a fight for survival: the pandemic has accelerated the shift to buying cosmetics, skincare and other pampering products online, and a growing number of sales are now via a smartphone rather than over the counter.
Manicured sales assistants, testing pots and makeovers are being replaced by powerful influencers and digital beauty halls that can switch up the products on offer at the tweak of an algorithm.
Continue reading...In 2016, when Alicia Keys released her sixth studio album, Here, she celebrated the launch with a gig in New York’s Times Square. An article written in the Guardian by a journalist who was on the promotional junket described the machinery of her management system at the time, as functioning “like an onion”. A formidable, multi-layer of managers, confidants, coaches, assistants, a personal film crew and various people with ambiguous job functions formed around Keys, like a “shock absorber”. Fast forward to 2021. I am waiting to interview Keys via Zoom on the day she launches a special edition of Songs in A Minor, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking award-winning debut album that started it all. When she appears on screen there is no “onion”, no entourage, no shock absorber. Just her. She is sitting on a light-coloured sofa in front of a floor-to-ceiling wall of immaculately lined-up books. And she is trying to pull a jumper on. Her voice – smooth, deep and slightly gravelly – calls out, “Good morning!” and as she inches in to take her position close to the screen, she smiles so fully that every crevice of her face lights up.
Looking at a barefaced Alicia Keys, hair pulled back into a bun, one can’t help marvel at how much she still resembles the 20-year-old who made her 2001 TV debut singing Falling on The Oprah Winfrey Show. (Winfrey, who calls herself Alicia’s “mother-sister-friend” has since said, “Even before she belted out the first soulful notes of the lyrics that made her famous, I could feel the power of her presence.”) Following the God-like endorsement of the influential Winfrey (and the backing of Clive Davis, the legendary music producer who gave Keys her big break), the song topped the charts. The album sold millions (10.5m physical sales and 645.8m streams to date) and Keys was nominated in six Grammy award categories. She won five of them and has since gone on to win 10 more. Keys is still awestruck that she, and the album that brought her global fame, still have a presence today.
Continue reading...From shaving to threading to dyeing to painting, the little touches that used to seem so important have been squeezed out by the pandemic. And many Britons are all the happier for it
During the first lockdown Afsaneh Parvizi-Wayne, a 55-year-old entrepreneur, went for a drive around London. “I remember looking in the rear-view mirror,” she says, “and I noticed all these little hairs coming out of my chin. That was a bit of a shock. Like, bloody hell, I’ve really been growing these out.”
Parvizi-Wayne is of Iranian heritage, and hair removal is a big part of her culture. “Grooming, for Iranian women, it’s essential,” she says. For her entire life, from puberty onwards, Parvizi-Wayne had scrupulously removed her facial hair. “It was like a jack-in-the-box reaction,” she says. “If I saw a hair, I’d go to the salon.” If she failed to do so, a relative or family friend would take care of it for her. “Iranian aunties literally pin you down if they see a stray chin hair,” she laughs. “They pull out a piece of string to thread you then and there.”
Continue reading...I had the tubes of moisturiser and foundation, the mirror with lights around it and, most importantly, a professional to guide me
I’ve always taken the view with makeup that it’s a bit like football refereeing: if you notice it, that’s a sure sign a bad job’s being made of it. By that measure, the many television makeup artists who have worked their magic on me over the years have done a fine job, because I’ve never really seen any difference. Sometimes they ask me what I “normally have” – a question for which I never have an answer. My only advice to them is to not bother doing anything with my hair, all attempts to adjust it being in vain.
This week, in the interests of Covid-compliant TV production, I lost my makeup-applying virginity. I had all the gear – the brushes, the tubes, the mirror with the lights around it – and I even had a nice masked and visored makeup artist. But she was only allowed to supervise; no touching permitted.
Continue reading...Barcelona-based firm is thought to have fought off bids from Unilever, L’Oréal and Shiseido
The celebrity makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury has handed a control of her namesake makeup and skincare empire to a Spanish fashion and fragrances business in a deal that could have valued the company at up to £1bn just seven years after she started it.
Tilbury, 47, personally owned between half and 75% of the company until signing a deal with the Barcelona-based Puig will likely have handed her a cash payout worth tens of millions of pounds. The Spanish firm also owns brands including Paco Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier and Nina Ricci.
Continue reading...A new study finds women who wear heavy makeup are perceived as less competent. Perhaps it’s time to make our own rules
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Continue reading...Youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner reality TV family tops Mark Zuckerberg by two years
Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, has become the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of just 21.
Jenner, who grew up under the watch of TV cameras filming Keeping Up with the Kardashians, was on Tuesday admitted to the “nine-zero” fortune club by Forbes. The business magazine ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person. She became a billionaire two years younger than the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took the title at the age of 23 in 2008.
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