Trinny Scrubs Up With Face Cleansers, Part of New Skin Care Category
LONDON — Like many entrepreneurs, and marketers, Trinny Woodall cannot sit still. Not only has she been launching products every few months for her eponymous beauty brand, she loves nothing more than demonstrating, to one and all, how they work.
Woodall is launching skin-care this week with two facial cleansers, a balm and a gel that are meant to feed the skin’s microbiome. To show how they work, she is on the Zoom screen, extolling her favorite facial exercises, and eyebrow and lymph node massages, and showing how they can improve the products’ efficacy.
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“The mastication of a horse eating grass is phenomenal. You need to put your tongue at the back of your mouth and pretend you’re eating grass,” said Woodall as she made big, loud chewing noises as part of an exercise aimed at oxygenating the skin.
“The organ of skin loves blood flow, and we don’t give our faces enough blood flow. I’ve always been quite rough with my face, but the key to massage is not dragging too much in one direction,” said Woodall, who demonstrated a rapid, no-drag “scissoring” method around the eyebrows.
She plans to accompany the launch of her two cleansers, a balm called Be Your Best, and a gel called Better Off, with myriad videos showing women how to clean, massage and oxygenate their skin.
Woodall has created the two products to remove makeup and to cleanse and wants her customers to use them once in the morning, and twice at night.
She advises those with normal-to-dry skin to use the balm, while the gel is better suited to normal-to-oily complexions. They can be used one after the other.
Woodall said the company spent considerable time on the formulations, and the washing is meant to prep the skin for makeup in the daytime, or treatments at night.
FABIANA DELCANTON
The Be Your Best Enzyme Balm Cleanser includes almond and jojoba oils, natural glycolipids and pineapple enzyme. It also contains a prebiotic complex for the skin’s microflora.
The Better Off AHA/PHA Gel Cleanser is meant to be an exfoliating, conditioning gel that contains natural quillaja and oat amino acids as well as lactic acid and malic acid. It also has lactobionic acid, which helps to exfoliate and hydrate.
She wanted the smell to conjure “that medicinal feeling of an herb garden, with wildflowers in the distance.”
The products have all been developed and made in the brand’s U.K. labs. The packaging is fully refillable, and Woodall said the idea is that they can live in a person’s bathroom “for years.” The balm costs $45 while the gel is priced at $38.
The cleansers and self-care rituals surrounding them kick off what promises to be a busy year for the brand. There are more skin-care products in the pipeline and Woodall said that in year one the category will generate between 10 and 25 percent of sales and, ideally, double after that.
She is also expecting revenue to double to 90 million pounds, or more, this year thanks to skin-care and related products that are set to launch. The brand has generated more than 100 million pounds in revenues since it launched in 2017.
“I’m looking at skin-care as a new category,” said Woodall who believes she has something unique to offer. “I’m not a makeup artist, I’m a consumer, and I’m also an expert in making over women. My knowledge of makeup and skincare is equal.”
Woodall is a household name in the U.K., and has had multiple professional lives — entrepreneur, TV personality, YouTuber, author, newspaper columnist and fashion makeover expert.
During the interview she talked about her first forays into skincare, visiting Lord & Taylor in New York as a teenager and falling under the spell of Clinique’s three-step cleansing ritual. As the years rolled on, she recalled treating her severe acne with a variety of brands and products.
“I did a range a year — and then another 200 to 300 ranges,” said Woodall, ticking off brands she’s tried, including Erno Laszlo, Guinot and Clarins.
She said with her new skin care, she wants to put the focus on clarity, simplicity and understanding and help her customers through the maze of single ingredients in particular.
“I think we’ve got to a place in life where the buzzword is ‘ingredients,’ but my God if I know where they go — and in what order. And there is so much misuse as well, people thinking, ‘I can’t ever use this together with that,’ or ‘I can’t use this in the sun,’ or ‘I can use this anytime’ — and then their skin gets confused.”
She prizes simplification, and personalization in beauty. She launched Trinny in 2017 as a direct-to-consumer business with a focus on personalization, and specifically a color test called Match2Me.
Customers fill out an online questionnaire that helps them pick the right products for their skin tone, hair and eye color, and can browse hundreds of made-over women on the brand’s site to get an idea of which products would suit them best.
Her cosmetics come in small stackable pots, while the bestselling BFF Cream Skin Perfector is a primer in a tube. BFF stands for Best Friend Forever, a name that derives from Woodall’s years of research into products to remedy her once acne-prone skin.
Her vision for Trinny is to be “the leader in personalization,” a segment of the market that Woodall argues is underdeveloped. She told WWD in an interview last year that there are launches in the pipeline for 2022 that will not only accelerate sales, but also break new ground with regard to personalization in beauty.
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