The word ‘beautiful’ is banned in my offices
From Saturday girl to Dermalogica founder, Jane Wurwand has battled skincare sexism for decades, she tells Julia Llewellyn Smith
Jane Wurwand started her working life aged 13, as a Saturday girl sweeping the floor in a Poole hairdresser before training as a beautician and going on to found the esteemed skincare brand Dermalogica, which sells more than 28million products globally each year. Yet, astonishingly for someone who’s made a fortune from face creams, she has banned the word “beauty” from her offices.
“I call it the ‘B’ word,” cries Wurwand, 59. “I hate the word ‘beautiful’, other than applied to a sunset, and even then I’d rather say: ‘Stunning’. I’ve always found the word regressive. It’s very gender specific, and it’s only ever applied to women in a cosmetic context.
“My aspiration is not to be beautiful,” she continues. “My aspiration is to be significant. I don’t want to be classified as pretty; I don’t care if you think I’m pretty or not, it’s about how I feel within myself and how I want to look.”
But this is a woman who worked as one of Mary Quant’s first make-up artists, in a uniform of knee-high patent boots. “Yes, but I quickly became quite disillusioned with the way everyone was selling smoke and mirrors: [Revlon founder] Charles Revson would have called it ‘hope in a jar’; it was all secret slimming wraps and wrinkle removers and bust enlargers, really mythological territory, and I decided quite early on that I didn’t want to deal with this concept of illusion and artifice.”
Wurwand moved from make-up into skincare, creating a soberly packaged brand, sold mainly in salons by qualified therapists, which promised nothing more than better skin. “What we do is not pampering, not luxury, not indulgence. I’m not going to be ‘queen for a day’,” she says. “All of that, I believe, infantilises women. It makes us diminutive. If we’re talking gender equality, language is so important.”
In an industry powered by more hot air than Richard Branson’s balloons, such talk is revolutionary, but then everything about Dorset-bred but Los Angeles-based Wurwand makes her stand out from her often fluffy colleagues. Greyhound slim, with short, spiky bleached hair and wearing a grey dress under a leather jacket, she’s zingier than a double dose of Berocca, but also as cosy as a cashmerequilted hottie. You can just imagine her former salon clients pouring out their hearts to her and she, in turn, encouraging them to make the best of themselves in every possible way.
We’re sitting in a central London boardroom of the multinational Unilever, to which Wurwand and her business partner and husband Raymond sold Dermalogica in 2015, chastened by the story of fellow entrepreneur Dame Anita Roddick. “She passed away just 14 months after she sold The Body Shop to L’oréal, so she never had the chance to enjoy her life post-acquisition,” Wurwand says, brown eyes sparkling. “I said to Ray: ‘We can’t risk anything like that.’ We want to have enough runway on the other side of our success to enjoy it. Anyway, Mum always said: ‘Jane, leave the party before your dress is wrinkled and your make-up smudged, leave when you’re still having a good time’.”
She’s thrilled by the support that Unilever has pledged to her FITE (Financial Independence Through Entrepreneurship) initiative, which since 2011 has granted small business loans to 62,000 women worldwide, allowing them to achieve financial independence. “The one thing I insist on in my marriage is that we have our own bank account and joint bank account for expenses. If I want to spend £20 on a pair of knickers I can,” she says. “When I worked in the salon, I’d have clients come in and say ‘Can I pay a third on a credit card, a third on a cheque and the last third in cash?’ and a friend who owns a boutique in LA says it still happens. It’s infantilising women and I hate it. Money gives you freedom of choice, and that is a fundamental human right.”
Wurwand’s fervour is the result of witnessing what happened to her mother, who found herself widowed, aged 38, after her company-director husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving her to bring up four daughters alone. “I can’t believe how she did it!” exclaims Wurwand, who was two at the time. “They had just moved into a new house and Dad hadn’t even signed the mortgage papers, so amid all the shock and the grief, she had to go back to work.”
A trained nurse who, as was then the rule, had been obliged to give up work when she married, Wurwand’s mother reprised her career, doing night shifts so she could still care for her youngest daughter. “I had a fantastic childhood,” says Wurwand, who attributes her resilience and a reckless streak to that early bereavement. “The worst thing that could happen to a person – losing a parent – had already happened to me and, naive and silly as it sounds, that makes you feel you’ve already had that card dealt to you, so maybe nothing terrible can happen now.”
It was with that mindset that, aged 21, she decided to emigrate to South Africa, which was offering assisted packages to trained beauty therapists. With only enough cash to fund three nights in a cheap Cape Town hotel, within 24 hours she had blagged herself a job. She went on to work for Revlon, South Africa, where she met Raymond, a business school graduate.
In 1983, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where three years later, having borrowed $15,000, they founded the Dermal Institute, training beauty therapists, who then used the products they’d formulated. “In the UK, people would have dismissed me as too young, without enough funding or connections. I didn’t go to university, I didn’t have a network, I didn’t have any money.”
As the business expanded into 80 countries, Wurwand was often on the receiving end of sexism: “I remember one vendor meeting where I walked in first and they said, ‘What did you do before you came to work for your husband?’ I said I was his secretary and used to sit on his lap, and my team burst out laughing. He was very apologetic but I said: ‘Don’t make that mistake with somebody else’.”
Unlike Raymond, she has also had to endure endless questions about how she managed to balance work and bring up their two daughters, now aged 23 and 18. Now, in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, she believes the moment has come for women to effect real change adding: “We have to make sure we grab it and tip it over the top. We will not allow that tide to recede again.”