The woman who blew up the beauty industry – plus her skincare tips

“I don’t have a poker face. I’m not very good at pretending or hiding,” says Caroline Hirons, super-blogger, founder of beauty business Skin Rocks, and walking encyclopaedia of skincare knowledge.

If you haven’t yet watched Hirons on camera calling out hyperbolic marketing blather and putting the world to rights then you are missing out. If she’s not dishing out impressively geekish nuggets of individual skincare advice at breakneck speed, she’s giving Gwyneth Paltrow a rap across the knuckles for her cavalier notions about sunscreen application. And Boris Johnson has not escaped being thrown a Hirons grenade for failing to back the beauty industry during Covid (her most-watched Instagram video ever, with half a million views).

Fiercely bright, candid to a fault, not to mention drop dead funny… such is her impact, she can make a product go viral. If you have a bottle of Pixi Glow Tonic or a Clinique Take The Day Off Cleansing Balm on your bathroom shelf right now, it can likely be attributed to the “Caroline effect” (that particular Clinique product actually escaped being discontinued following her endorsement).

I meet Hirons, 53, at her offices in Kensington, where a cardboard cut-out of George Michael greets visitors at the door, the boardroom chairs are upholstered in a mix of ballerina pink velvet and leopard print, and there’s a tongue-in-cheek pink lacquered sign on Hirons’ desk imprinted with her sobriquet: “The most powerful woman in beauty.” In person, as on screen, she boasts a seemingly lit-from-within complexion. Today, she is wearing a highlighter-pink sweater that coordinates with her environment.

After building her fame on social media, she launched Skin Rocks last year, plus an app that promises to personalise her vast repository of beauty knowledge: it is designed with an algorithm to make bespoke recommendations of products based on budget, skin type and the store you are in. Her first book, Skincare, was a bestseller. Oh, and she’s just debuted her first skincare line, releasing her first two products – retinoid serums – into the world “community first” (ie, no fancy press launch and her followers get first dibs). “The proof is in the pudding,” she says with characteristic nonchalance.

When I ask her what she offers her community of ardent fans that they can’t get elsewhere, the answer is remarkably simple. “Knowledge, truth – just help, really. My frustration was that the industry almost seemed to endorse confusion, because it would lead to more sales,” she says. “But ultimately that doesn’t lead to more customer retention.”

Ah, the wisdom of the one- time beauty counter assistant. After moving from Liverpool to London aged 17 and initially getting a job at HMV (she met her husband Jim not long after and they had their first child when she was 22), Hirons began her career in beauty at the luxury Knightsbridge department store Harvey Nichols in the late 1990s. “Harvey Nicks was ground zero for celebs; it was so much fun,” she says. “You didn’t know who you’d look up and see: we’d have Goldie Hawn talking to Cher across the counter.”

That first gig at Harvey Nicks was selling Aveda. “I really loved selling skincare to people and it came easy to me in terms of never selling customers something they didn’t need.”

But it was when she moved across the shop floor to Space NK that she truly found her metier. “They had so many brands, and if you were a sponge you would just go on every single training day, just to take it all in. That’s where a lot of my brand knowledge started.”

She began training to be a facialist at Steiner School of Beauty in 2001 (“I knew that if I wanted people to take me seriously, I needed to have some initials after my name”). She was a mother of two at this point, and fitting in classes at night around the demands of her day job required tenacity enough, but it also coincided with a further two pregnancies.

Despite the exhausting juggle, being an older woman felt like an advantage: “I was the one who would always turn up with my uniform pristine, on time, homework done, and say, ‘Where is everyone?’ [My fellow students] would pop out for cigarettes and I’d say, ‘Let’s start. I’m not waiting for them.’”

Her early dabblings with social media were motivated more by curiosity than a business plan. She noticed a lot of her fellow beauticians were tweeting about make-up and nails, so she thought she might give talking about skincare a go. “I was trying to get people to stop using face wipes.” She pointed out they were environmental demons, effectively pushing dirt around your face, rather than cleaning it. Someone suggested she turn what she was doing into a blog and a social media star was born.

Before Kim Kardashian’s bottom was breaking the internet, Hirons found she was regularly crashing the blogging platform: “In the earliest years of the blog, one of the posts had 1,300 comments.” And, yes, of course, she answered every one. “I’d sit there all night and tell my husband, ‘Just one last question.’ Because I just thought, they’ve asked me this. I can’t let them hang. You kind of get back what you put in.” (She worked out the other day that she has done “about 250,000” replies to questions on her blog, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube channels “and that doesn’t include live chats”.)

The rise of Hirons’ star was part of a seismic systemic shift in the beauty industry that saw the power and authority of its traditional glossy magazine gatekeepers start to ebb away. Beauty experts who spoke directly to their fans on social platforms were not beholden to advertisers. “If you were a blogger, you never thought, ‘Well this might upset LVMH or Chanel.’ It was just, do you like the product or not,” she says. “Social media definitely put the power back in the hands of the consumer.”

At the time, Hirons was also working behind the scenes of the beauty industry as a brand consultant, which brought up potential conflicts that she tackled head-on. “People I was consulting with thought they would automatically get onto the blog,” she says. “I would say, ‘No, you are paying me for my expertise, to make sure you go to the right retailer and have the right relationship with your staff; it’s not about the blog.’” She soon moved away from those monthly retainers to go it alone.

These days she helms a team of 32 at Skin Rocks, which saw a turnover of £10 million last year. “Every single penny has gone into the app, which is free, and into the brand. It all goes back into the business.” She is immensely proud of the wages she pays (the starting salary is £30k) and that she has created a culture where staff benefit from flexi-time – “I want to offer what I wasn’t offered.”

In many ways, the power of Caroline Hirons only amplified during the pandemic. She took to broadcasting Monday to Friday “Live at five” on her social media channels. Her audience grew by 200 per cent in a matter of weeks and her impassioned support for the nation’s beauty counter professionals resulted in her being invited to emergency summits with PR and HR departments of some major brands.

In response to the hardship many beauty practitioners were suffering, she founded the charity Beauty Backed. “We’ve raised and donated over a million quid to charity for the beauty industry since lockdown: £400k was from us and £600k was me nagging people in the industry, picking up the phone to people like L’Oréal and saying, ‘I need your money. Your hairdressers cannot feed their kids.’”

Of course, there have been challenges along the way. Her book was more than a labour of love to produce: “When I came to write it, I finally got diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 50, never leaving it too late,” she deadpans. And thanks to Brexit and the pandemic, her skincare line is taking longer to develop than it might have done. Eventually, there will be a suite of products that make up a basic skin routine, but don’t expect her to go overboard.

“I’m not going to just bombard the industry with endless products. What would be the point, as there are already fantastic products out there? Until I’m at a point where I know I would use my cleanser over anyone else’s, I’m not going to release it. It can’t be just good enough; it has to be something I would use every day.”

When it comes to her own beauty regime, she’s not against the odd tweakment. “I like taking care of my skin and sometimes that means I have a bit of filler at my temple to try and pull back what nature has made sag. I know I am going to age, but everyone has their own insecurity; everyone has a vision of themselves and how they want to look.”

So what is next for Hirons and Skin Rocks? She says it is all about growing the app – both in terms of the community it reaches and what it can do for them. “The app hasn’t really even touched the sides of what it can do yet. It is a real game changer.”

And there’s something else niggling her: she wants to change the image of female CEOs. She’s noticed many narratives of female chief executives are told through the lens of “struggle” and it grates. “Why do women have to struggle? Why can’t they just be successful at what they do?”

Why indeed? Caroline Hirons: unapologetically successful CEO, beauty geek and game changer. Light blue touch paper and stand well back.