Skincare expert Caroline Hirons is renowned as the “most powerful woman in beauty”
(Picture: Caroline Hirons)Caroline Hirons breezes into the boardroom of her west London office with the scrubbed-clean, peaches and cream complexion of a milk maid (any Hirons fan would know that she calls her skin “mature” — in real life it looks poreless and expensive). Since adding “tech entrepreneur” and “skincare founder” to her CV (she launched the Skin Rocks app in the summer and quickly followed it with the first products from her new Skin Rocks skincare line — a pair of vitamin A serums: Retinoid 1 and Retinoid 2), the “most powerful woman in beauty” has become busier than ever.
Today, she has back-to-back meetings, she explains, though she drops into focus mode as soon as we begin talking. The thing that really makes her tick, she tells me, is business — she likes new ideas, problem-solving, taking action. This business is her life, she gestures around the boardroom (all very Instagrammable, down to the pink marble-topped boardroom table), she doesn’t do hobbies or holidays — “actually, no, I went to Italy for four days in July — it was too hot, and I was moaning the whole time”.
At this point, I get the sense that she is done with dispensing skincare advice. It’s not that she has lost her passion for it or the industry — it’s just that as the aesthetician, blogger and best-selling author transitions into her mogul era, free time is increasingly hard to find.
Hirons estimates that since launching her eponymous blog in 2010, she has answered 250,000 skincare questions from readers and followers. The idea behind her Skin Rocks app, she tells me, was to create a basic catalogue of products. This would allow people to look something up and know immediately what was in it, whether it was suitable for their skin type — “you know, all the questions I get asked all the time”.
That basic catalogue includes 12,000 products and as well as being a valuable (and free) resource for beauty consumers, presumably saves Hirons hours each week. She laughs at the suggestion: “Something like that.”
She launched the app and skincare line both within the space of six months. The hardest lesson? “Patience.” Upstairs there is a sign hanging in the hallway which reads “I’ve had an idea” and which is a present from one of her team.
“Because I’ll come in most days like, ‘I’ve had an idea!’ and you can see their faces drop… because of my Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), I want to do everything right now, I’m like, ‘let’s make it happen today’. I’ve had to surround myself with ‘No’ people. So patience has been a lesson — and not letting myself get frustrated by other people’s failures. I mean, when people disappoint you, there’s always a lesson in that.”
Hirons is a mesmerising speaker — fast talking and no-nonsense with a gift for inhabiting different perspectives. Speaking to her I get the sense that there’s a constant cost-benefit calculation going on in her head. It’s not so much that she is cautious with what she says, more that she’s prone to self-editing. At the end of our conversation, for instance, as I’m about to leave, she stops me and says that she would like to make sure that she doesn’t come across as woe-is-me about the ADD diagnosis. “I’m not complaining — I see it as my superpower.”
Patience has been a lesson — and not letting myself get frustrated by other people’s failures
Still, she was diagnosed only three years ago, at the age of 50 — so that must have been tough. “Obviously [before that] I thought there’s just something wrong with me, and my behaviour. Like ‘why can’t you sit still? Why can’t you focus? Why do you keep blurting things out?’ I still blurt. You’ll know that if you see me on social media. I’ll say things and then go, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that!’”
The diagnosis came after her daughter was tested for the condition — filling in a worksheet from the hospital, Hirons found herself answering “yes” to every question. “But I thought I didn’t need to do anything about it, because I’ve had it all my life, right? And then I sat down to write a book, and I couldn’t look at an empty page and start writing. I thought, ‘Well, how am I going to focus?’
“I’ve got all this info in my head, how do I get it onto a page? So I decided to get the official diagnosis and get some help.” It wasn’t as straightforward as she might have hoped and she ended up going private.
“This was like, August or September [2019], and they said, the next available appointment is July 2020. I had to deliver a book by the end of the year. I’m just fortunate that I was able to pay to be diagnosed, I wouldn’t have had the money to do that when I was younger.” She was put on medication and worked with an ADHD specialist. The book — Skincare: the Ultimate No-nonsense Guide — went on to become a best-seller. She laments the fact that she had to go private “but the NHS is drastically underfunded — purposely underfunded, in my opinion, so that they can sell it off in chunks”.
By “they” she means the Government. “This is the worst government I’ve ever known in my lifetime. We’ve become a joke, a running joke. It’s horrific.” Most horrific of all is how little funding goes towards mental health services, especially for young people. “That is as serious as it gets. I’m not being dramatic — we need more funds. It needs to be on the agenda because people need help.”
Born in Liverpool, Hirons moved to London aged 17. She had her first brush with the world of beauty in 1997 when she began working on the Aveda beauty counter in Harvey Nichols. After training in beauty therapy in the early 2000s, she went on to become a brand consultant for some of the biggest names in the industry. In that time, she also had four children with her husband, Jim — before launching her blog in the early social media days.
It was an almost instant success and Hirons found that, in the age of Instagram face, her readers loved her no-nonsense beauty advice. Her star has continued to rise ever since and perhaps this offers another clue to the self-editing. Since 2010, she has lived a very online life and has dealt with her fair share of trolling and backlashes.
In the past, she’s called out everyone from Boris Johnson (about his decision to keep beauty businesses closed during the pandemic), to Gwyneth Paltrow (who said she applies very little sunscreen — controversial advice from such an influential name in the industry). However, she tells me it’s not something she plans to spend much more time on.
“It does get very boring being the person that is expected to speak out — because once you speak out about one issue, you’re expected to speak out about them all.”
The problem isn’t the trolling, though that does happen (“I don’t pay attention. I’m long past that — I’m 53 and I couldn’t give a f***, frankly. You know, if you’ve got nothing else better to do with your time, I’m sorry for you”), it’s more that she doesn’t have the time.
“I was particularly vocal during lockdown about the beauty industry, and I’m vocal about women’s rights. But I can’t be the face of every drama that’s kicking off on social media. I’m busy.”
The entire Skin Rocks launch has been self-funded by Hirons. Last year, her company had a turnover of £10 million but, as she points out, the profits have been ploughed back into the new launches. “The app doesn’t even make any money,” she explains. “Yet.”
So it’s understandable that she is laser-focused on making it a success. The reason she didn’t want outside investment is because “every person I know in the industry — and that’s a lot of people — none of them have ever been happy with their investors.
“The words of advice I get from my girlfriends who have either had their own ranges and sold them, or who still have their own line and have investors is: if you can bear it, do not take other people’s money, because then the focus shifts to money. And my focus isn’t about money.” She didn’t want to name the app or skincare range after herself. “It’s not so callous as like ‘oh, this means I can sell it and I don’t have to worry about selling my name’, though obviously, you have that thought process in your head, because so many people in the industry have been burned when they go to sell.”
It was more that she wanted Skin Rocks to stand up as its own brand. It’s taken late nights and a lot of energy but the app has 117,000 daily users — and the serums are a sell-out success.
What was more difficult, I wonder, raising four children or launching a new arm of the business in such a short time? “The children,” she says. “The business isn’t hard — you just have to be good at handling stress and be ready to pivot quickly. But with the kids… raising four children with not a lot of money was infinitely harder. My husband and I didn’t have a pot to piss in — excuse the phrase — but we were living month to month. I’ve never had a handout in my life, everything I’ve got I’ve worked for. I might never be able to retire but that’s fine. I’ll just cross that bridge when I come to it.”
