My breakdown after selling perfume f irm, by Jo Malone
perfumer Jo malone has revealed she suffered a breakdown after selling her fragrance company.
miss malone said she became plagued by crippling anxiety attacks due to the shame of not working.
Her ordeal came despite banking millions of pounds from the sale of her luxury brand to estée Lauder, which she admitted left her in a highly privileged position.
The businesswoman, 56, even said being out of the beauty industry for five years was worse for her mental health than battling breast cancer in 2003.
miss malone sold her lifestyle brand – renowned for its luxury candles – in 1999 and stepped away from it altogether in 2006. She launched Jo Loves in 2011.
‘I hadn’t created fragrance for five years,’ she said on the Joe Wicks podcast.
‘A bit like exercise, if you suddenly come out of something after you do it for five years, you have to get yourself back in that rhythm again of building a business again and creating.
‘I just wanted to go back to where I’d left, that moment in time, five years previous. I was very ashamed at the time.
‘But I’m not now I have come through it, but I had a really horrible breakdown during that time.’ She revealed that, while she did not have to work and was well off, the loss of control in her life was too much to handle. ‘I could have sat on a beach every day, I didn’t have to [go back to work],’ she said.
‘I was in a really privileged position... but I suffer from anxiety and I know what my flick switch is – it’s control.
‘So the minute I lost that sense of control over my own life I just spiralled into anxiety and it manifested itself in really terrifying ways.
‘It took a year for me to recover and seek help and once I started to understand where anxiety came from, and stop being frightened of it, it stopped having its hold over me.’ miss malone revealed she starts hyperventilating when she suffers an anxiety attack.
She said the first time this happened was ‘utterly terrifying’ because she thought she was having a heart attack.
She added: ‘I was so ashamed. Why should I feel anxiety?
‘I was so ashamed of not being able to control it and not
‘Important to seek help’
pulling myself together. It’s so important to seek help and to talk to somebody.’
The businesswoman said that ‘you would have thought cancer would have brought me to my knees’ but ‘five years with nothing around me’ had a much more devastating impact. miss malone, who lives in London and has one son with husband Gary Willcox, recently denounced her former company after it replaced black actor John Boyega in the Chinese version of an advert he had created for the brand.
‘I am so horrified and disgusted about what has been done to John,’ she said on ITV’s Lorraine show last friday.
‘How dare somebody treat him [like that], and he finds out he is replaced on social media?
‘They never spoke to him. That for me is utterly despicable and is disgusting.’
The brand, which now has no association with miss malone despite bearing her name, has apologised for the decision.