Trinny Woodall on taking risks, addiction, and launching her beauty brand in Ireland

She rose to fame in the noughties, insisting that fewer than half of us were wearing the right sized bra. Today, she’s more confident than ever – and is on a mission to make women of all ages feel the same. By Kate Demolder 

Trinny Woodall poses at the launch of the TRINNY London pop-up at Selfridges on October 5, 2018 in London, England

There’s a lot of old school, don’t-make-a-fuss, “who, me?” energy about Trinny Woodall, the Trinny London founder whose life reads like a Jacqueline Wilson novel.

Born Sarah-Jane Duncanson Woodall, in 1964, in Marylebone, London, Woodall first made her mark by being sent home from school for cutting off another pupil’s plait. 

It caused family friend and author Ronald Searle to liken her to a St Trinians schoolgirl, a quip which led to the moniker we know her as today.

In her late teens and early twenties, based in Thatcherite London, Woodall fell into drug and alcohol misuse. 

It wasn’t until years later, when she and partner-in-fashion Susannah Constantine became known on the London circuit as bolshy, no-nonsense fashion journalists, that everything really turned around.

“I feel that every single thing we do adds to who we are,” she says, in the eye of the storm she’s caused with her presence in Brown Thomas’ Grafton Street store. Books are presented to be signed, iPhones lifted to get selfies.

“So if I hadn’t have been a using addict, I would never have understood how to make choices in life. And if I’d never met all of those brilliant women on What Not to Wear, I never would have launched Trinny London. So I never regret anything I’ve done in life, because all of it’s helped me to build a life on bricks, rather than quicksand.”

In many ways, the show deemed both Woodall and Constantine the original fashion influencers, and though fashion is still integral to what she does, work today for Woodall centres solely around Trinny London, the breathtakingly simplistic makeup brand she launched, at 52, in 2017, which expanded to skincare in April 2022.

To finance the brand’s early days, Woodall sold her home and some £60,000 worth of clothing.

“My daughter is livid,” she smiles. “Because that was 20 years worth of collecting fashion, fashion that she’s seen in pictures, down the drain. There’s still a shit load of stuff, don’t get me wrong, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Fortunately, the brand succeeded; growth exploded during the pandemic; the Trinny London team now stands at 170 and her products have reached cult status in Ireland, the UK, Australia, and the United States. (A bottle of her BFF Skin Perfector, costing €48, sells every 30 seconds — dropping mildly from 15 seconds when it originally launched).

Trinny: "Our whole thing has always been that we wanted to create products people can trust." Pic: Dan Kennedy

By prioritising realism over aspiration, Trinny London is appealing to women who feel under-represented in the beauty industry. Her products — most of which snap into place in circular pots — have been likened to a grown-up Glossier or a more affordable Westman Atelier; sitting neatly between the ludicrously expensive and shockingly cheap. (Woodall herself used to decant products into circular pots in her television days for ease, causing jealousy among friends.)

In many ways, her products evoke a friendly tone — product names include BFF De-Stress and Miracle Blur, which Woodall enthusiastically likens to spackle for the skin; other products are named for the friends of Woodall’s who invested way back when — something consumers rarely associate with large, intimidating department stores. 

At the heart of the Trinny London offering, too, is an online try-on and product recommendation tool, Match2Me, a metric which claims to takes the fuss out of beauty shopping.

“Our whole thing has always been that we wanted to create products people can trust,” she says, her eyes meeting mine. “Over the years, I’ve spoken to thousands of women about their appearance, and by a huge majority, makeup was what women panicked the most about; not knowing their colours; feeling intimidated by department stores, that sort of thing. Our products work on a system that makes that process easy; they range from A-E, with A being the coolest and E being the warmest. You find out what your undertones are via Match2Me, even when in-store, and you go from there. It’s foolproof.”

Of course, as anyone who follows her will know, products are only part of the Trinny experience. Woodall posts to her 1.3m Instagram followers multiple times a day, in various states of disarray and undress; a recent post sees her insisting she looks like “cat sick”. Though an undeniably glamorous woman in most facets of life, Woodall saves the times when she looks less than fresh to share with her followers.

It is, in fact, an incredible marketing strategy — as she proves how her products can entirely change a face, from exhausted to boardroom-ready.

“[That side of me] comes from not worrying what people think,” she smiles. “I spent my teens and twenties worrying desperately about what people thought of me. But when you’ve been through some quite big life things, that sense of keeping up appearances is so irrelevant,” she laughs.

“It is more important to me to make a connection with somebody, and you don’t make a connection by showing the best parts of yourself. I’m always drawn to somebody where I feel there’s something in there I want to get to know.”