TRINNY’S MADE UP WITH IRELAND

Her cosmetics and skincare range is beloved by millions and as Trinny London makes its grand debut here, the woman behind the brand tells Deirdre Reynolds Irish women just love colour

“IS it OK to wear green to Ireland?”, Trinny Woodall looks concerned.

The fashion queen packed lots of emerald style for her whirlwind trip to the Emerald Isle this week.

Based on the ‘Trinny Tribe’ already thronging her new counter at Brown Thomas, Magazine+ assures the British star she probably could’ve turned up in a full Riverdance rigout, and got away with it.

“I don’t think I’ll be going there,” she laughs. “My daughter, though, did Irish dancing for seven years, so she was a real Riverdancer.

“We don’t have Irish [ancestry], we have Scottish and Welsh, but she loved Irish dancing … the feet moved too fast for me [to try it]. When I went to Norway, I wore their summer national costume, it was beautiful, and it had a history and heritage.

“So I wanted to do a bit of a homage to Ireland — but I also couldn’t not have my sparkle.”

It’s that famed ‘Trinny glow’ which has turned her seven-year-old beauty brand, Trinny London, into a viral sensation.

One tube of her cult BFF

Skin Perfector reportedly sells every 30 seconds — and that figure is about to get even more frenzied after the founder herself finally brought her makeup and skincare range to Ireland to much fanfare on Wednesday.

“Irish women love wearing colour,” Trinny says, amid the middle of the maelstrom of samples and book signings at the Grafton St department store.

“I think what’s different from when I came four years ago is women are dialling back wearing the fake tan every day, to actually loving the skin they’re in, and I think that’s great.

“With the number of grey days you have, a lot of women want the brightness on their face, but it’s [now] about blush and glow, and not about matte and bronze, [which can] flatten the skin.

“My favourite woman is a woman who I call a ‘grown up woman’, because they know what they want, so they’re not going, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme, let me try, try, try’, and they’re also not, ‘I never wear make-up, I don’t know where to start’.

“It’s an emotional state of mind, it’s not an age.” Luminous at 60, Trinny may well be the best ad for her own beauty products, but the celebrity stylist admits it’s been a four-decade journey from self-consciousness to confidence, after suffering badly with acne in her earlier days. Neither has she made any secret of the fact that she also uses Botox to achieve her yearsyounger look.

“From 13 to 30, people would go, ‘Trinny, how are you?’,” she demonstrates how someone would stare at the scars on her face while talking to her. “‘Is that a mark you’ve got on there?’, and then they’d embarrassingly touch it.

“I had chronic acne and it probably affected very much how I presented myself, so I would always be very over-conscious of my skin — to sit in lighting like this I would feel really uncomfortable.

“For years and years, I tried different antibiotics, and then at 30 I did Roaccutane, and it did get rid of it, and it was for me a transformation.”

The experience sparked a lifelong obsession with skincare that works previously only piqued by the Pond’s Cold Cream Cleanser used by her mother.

But the beauty guru concedes that to many women of a certain age she’s still best known as the underwear-obsessed presenter of What Not to Wear alongside Susannah Constantine.

The hit makeover reality show ran for seven series (five of which with the pair at the helm) on BBC from 2001 to 2007.

So does an ill-fitting bra still upset Trinny?

“I haven’t been asked that question in a long time,” laughs the Londoner, who was born Sarah-Jane Duncanson Woodall, and was nicknamed ‘Trinny’ by St Trinian’s author and family pal Ronald Searle after getting in trouble at school.

“There’s definitely different people who will associate me with something, and some people as if I just finished doing it, which I stopped doing it 20 years ago.

“I really live in the time I am today, but I wouldn’t have what I have today if I hadn’t done all the work I’d done before.

“So I never think, ‘Oh f***, I wish you wouldn’t ask that question’, because that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing now. And that was the beginning also of my love of getting a woman to shift how she feels, because a makeover is not [just] how you look.”

In any event, Lyla, her 20-year-old daughter with her late ex-husband Jonathan Elichaoff, is unlikely to heed her mum’s fashion advice, despite raiding the amazing designer wardrobe she stands to inherit.

“She’s at university,” tells Trinny. “She has her own style, different from mine.

“She raids my wardrobe every day, but she wears it so differently.

“I showed her this beautiful leopard print Saint Laurent dress I’d worn from the 90s — you know, when it’s like your first expensive dress, you treasure it and think, ‘I’ll one day give it to my daughter’. She looked at it and went, ‘It’s so old-fashioned’.

“I said, ‘Here’s the scissors, do what you like’, so she made it a mini skirt, put it on with thick black tights and black heavy boots and she looked so good.”

Online, where she shares the good, the bad and the ugly several times a day, it’s a very different story, with an army of 1.3m Instagram followers hanging on her every post.

Of course, with such a loyal fan base comes the occasional backbiter, something Pilates practitioner

Trinny says she’s fine with.

“On Instagram I do respond to every comment, because it helps me to understand the barometer of what people are feeling on different things.

“There might be a person who would say something [negative], and then I usually do nothing because other people in the community actually say something, so I just leave it. They’ve got my back.

“When I was turning 50, somebody told me, ‘When you turn 50, you don’t worry what people think’. I turned 50, and it was a really challenging year — my daughter’s father died — and then when I was

51, and things had calmed down, I thought, ‘She was so right’, you don’t worry [about what others think], and when you stop worrying about what people think it gives you this freedom.

“For me, when you turn 60 and you feel good about it, you then know what you don’t want. It doesn’t mean I know what I want, but knowing what you don’t want makes life simpler.”

As well as streamlining her life, powerhouse Trinny — who’s also overcome drug addiction — has also streamlined her beauty regime, and is regularly seen slapping on her makeup in as little as 90 seconds online, although she confesses it takes up to half an hour on special occasions.

Yet the biggest advice she wants to pass on to other women who’ve lived a full life, or are just starting on their journey, has absolutely nothing to do with either underwear or under-eye concealer.

“Fear less,” she states simply, a mantra which inspired the name of her 2023 book.

“Fear, in the early part of my life, made life really challenging for me, and it’s what makes us freeze in our tracks and not make change.

“If we can get to the stage where we can fearlessly feel our best self — not ‘be’ our best self, ‘feel’ our best self, it’s very different — that’s where

I’d like to help women to get to.”

Fear, in the early part of my life, made life really challenging for me and it’s what makes us freeze in our tracks and not make change

MARISSA Carter set up Cocoa Brown in 2012, and soon it became a worldwide sensation, tanning everyone from Kylie Jenner to Ariana Grande. Though outwardly, everything seemed to be going smoothly, Marissa took a step back from the business — and the public eye — in 2021, citing some difficulties with business partners.

But after every storm the sun shines again, and it wasn’t long before the 41-year-old came back to the helm of her ship. “I’ve been almost a year now back driving Cocoa Brown. The first six months were pretty much all behind the scenes. It’s only sort of in the last month or so that I’ve been doing interviews and photographs and shoots and videos. It’s like I’m back on tour, I’ve been kind of in the background writing the music and now I’m on tour,” she tells Magazine+.

“I kind of feel like I’m only at the start of that process now, so maybe ask me again in six months time if it’s been overwhelming or not, but at the moment, you know,

I’m just so happy to be doing what I love. I’m so passionate about creating beauty products. It just feels bloody fabulous to be doing what I love again. I’m enjoying the process.”

The Dublin native knew she was going out on a limb when she created the company, but it seems like that was par for the course. “I had grand ambitions, I had this huge dream of becoming a best-selling tan. I was mad. I was young. I was foolish. I had no idea what challenges I’d come up against. But I had this vision of, like, I want to create something huge,” she says.

“I’ve always been a bit mad, I’ve always had delusions of grandeur. I have that gene where I just think, ah, sure, how hard can it be?”

It takes a whole lot of self-belief to make that happen, and it’s something she has in droves. “I think self confidence is something that gets better the more you practise it, and you can build confidence. We might see someone else doing a fabulous job at whatever the challenge is we want to take on. We think ‘What gives me the audacity to think I can do it as well as they are or better’,” she says.

“For that reason, you have to confront your ego and say, am I willing to be compared to how XYZ person or company is doing it? How am I going to feel being bad at something when I first start? Because you will be bad. You will not from day one be fabulous at it. You will be compared and you may even be considered a wannabe, but every single person is a wannabe,” she adds.

It’s fitting, then, that Marissa was one of the first ambassadors for Creidim Ionat in 2022, an Irish language initiative that literally translates to ‘I believe in you’. The campaign sees well-known Irish figures take on challenges designed to encourage their language learning and practise.

Marissa’s advice to this year’s troops — which includes The 2 Johnnies and Brendan Courtney — is to embrace what level they’re currently at. “Your Irish doesn’t need to be perfect. Just have fun with it and try to include it in daily practice. Instead of saying ‘Thank you’ to the shopkeeper say go raibh maith agat. Maybe do little things like start your email with dia dhuit,” she says.

“I always sign off my emails since Creidim

Ionat as Gaeilge. It doesn’t matter whether I’m saying thank you to a distributor in Sweden or in Poland,

I’m still always signing off with tabhair aire or mise le meas. I’ve been so shocked by the amount of people that will reply and use cúpla focail back to me.”

When she is not creating new products or practicing her language skills, Marissa is also a mother of two; Charlie (11), and Belle (9). It makes parts of her job even more challenging.

“I don’t enjoy leaving the kids. I just don’t enjoy that at all. I get so anxious about travelling and

I think self confidence is something that gets better the more you practise

leaving them at home, but there’s certain travel that I just have to do. I think as the kids get a little bit older, that will get easier. At the moment, you know, I’m still finding it very stressful to go away and leave them at home,” she admits.

“They’re still at an age where I know that they are missing me fiercely and I’m missing them fiercely and I find that hard. So the travel element of it is just, at the moment, it’s not something I enjoy.”

When they do grow up, does she foresee them joining her in the business world? “Whatever it is they want to do, I’ll support them. If they want to go down the entrepreneurship road, they will do that with their eyes wide open because they will have seen from my journey the hustle. They won’t go into it thinking, ‘oh, this will be loads of fun and a wild ride’,” Marissa says.

“They’ll have seen the other side. They’ll have seen the grit. They’ll have seen the resilience. They’ll have seen the failure. They’ll have seen the mistakes. So if they do, they will go into this having seen both sides of the coin.”

While the hustle may well have been hard, and the challenges plentiful, Marissa’s happiness comes from creation.

“I’m very arty farty. I love making anything. It doesn’t matter whether I’m making a plant pot, lemon drizzle cake, or Sunshine Serum. It doesn’t matter what the medium is,” she says with a laugh.

“I am happiest when I am working with my hands, testing, trialling. If you can imagine a chocolatier in Willy Wonka’s factory, that’s what I’m like when I’m in the beauty lab. Just having the time of my life creating products.”

■ #CreidimIonat is a Foras na Gaeilge initiative in partnership with RTÉ that helps you take the next step with the Irish language.

Join mentors and mentees and take the next step on your Creidim Ionat journey by following the steps each week on forasnagaeilge.ie

‘I WAS MAD. I WAS YOUNG, I WAS FOOLISH. I HAD NO IDEA WHAT CHALLENGES I’D COME UP AGAINST...’