I had an epic fake tan disaster on my wedding day — now I run a beauty empire
Co. Tyrone entrepreneur Linda Stinson, founder of Bellamianta and Iconic Bronze.
‘I just could not stop thinking about owning my own business. It was like a burning desire. I used to get angry every year when I hadn’t done it. And every year that I got older and with every business idea I’d thought of that somebody else then started, I was like: ‘Fuck sake, I thought of that! Why didn’t I just go and do it?’ ”
In 2015, Linda Stinson finally did just go and do it, and a decade on, the 42-year-old mum of three from Pomeroy in Co Tyrone is chief executive of a beauty empire that’s set to hit a £10m (about €11.5m) turnover this year, with her brand sold in 10 countries and stocked in retail giants such as Boots, Dunnes, and Primark.
She knows the power of a good fake tan — “it makes you feel way more confident” — but the hero product that kick-started her entrepreneurial journey was born out of epic fake tan fail on her wedding day.
Rewind to November 29, 2014. Bride-to-be Stinson had woken up to find her perfectly applied spray tan had not only clung to the multiple eczema patches on her skin, its guide colour wouldn’t wash off and her armpits were a lurid shade of green. Stinson resorted to using “domestic bleach” on her underarms — don’t try this at home, folks! — while her sister lashed foundation on her back in an attempt to “cover the marks” and even out her skintone.
Despite the disaster, she had “a brilliant day”, and the dodgy tan sparked a “eureka moment” that would change her life forever.
At that point, Stinson had been in the beauty industry for years, working for trailblazing brands such as Benefit, Urban Decay, and Space NK. Their success and her own ambition — she’d begun earning her own money at the age of 13 — fuelled her desire to be her own boss, and having settled on selling a product rather than a service —“you can make money when you’re sleeping” — her wedding day tanning disaster serendipitously highlighted a gap in the booming fake tan market.
Back in 2014, almost all tans contained alcohol, which can exacerbate dryness, itchiness, and irritation — disastrous for anyone with dermatitis or sensitive skin. Stinson hit on her tan USP by creating a “clean” formula that was “performance driven” — she’d noticed that many of the so-called dark tans available simply didn’t deliver, and dark tan was what a lot of Irish women wanted.
Stinson was already mum to Holly (now 16) and pregnant with her second child, Ruby (now 10) — eight-year-old Savannah makes up the trio of daughters she shares with husband Jason — but instinct told her the time was right to strike out on her own and she could “make it work”.
She also knew that while running a business is “24/7” it would, nonetheless, afford her a certain amount of flexibility as a mum. (As an employer, she now tries to give her own staff that flexibility where possible “because I know how important it is as a mother to not miss those little moments”.)
In 2015, Stinson launched Bellamianta with a super-moisturising tanning lotion that had gone through a staggering 97 iterations to perfect, along with an innovative velvet tanning mitt with a thumb — “now everybody has them”. (She was also savvy enough to seek out a factory that agreed to her owning all of her formulations; vital, as “nobody can copy your recipe”.)
In the beginning, she admits, “doors were getting closed on us”, but Stinson “believed in the formula. I believed in the product. I knew the mitt could be a hook”, and persevered. The network she’d built up in her beauty career travelling “the length and breadth of Ireland” began to pay dividends, and multiple beauty salons who knew her and trusted her took on her tan to sell as a retail product.
In hindsight, her timing couldn’t have been more perfect, although there’s no denying Stinson made her own luck. 2015 was the year that Instagram blew up, morphing from a niche photo-sharing app into a major platform with over 400m users who were increasingly hot-to-trot for all things beauty, wellness, fashion, and fitness. Bloggers morphed into influencers, and Instagram made its advertising available to all, not just the big brands.
Stinson was an early adopter of social media advertising and, unlike most brands at the time, shrewdly realised the potential value of utilising influencers to create brand awareness. “That’s one thing that I did really well. It really helped me get my brand name out there.” She emailed or met the most influential bloggers in each of the 32 counties, gifting them her tan, while a friend in Facebook showed her how to “set up a business page, how to create adverts, how to boost posts”. The long days and late nights paid off and, before long, Bellamianta was the brand on everyone’s lips.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. “We made so many mistakes at the start, honestly,” Stinson says. “And all those mistakes helped grow into the business that it is today.” In the space of a year, the salons were selling buckets of tan, Bellamianta had been taken on by a large pharmacy chain, and the business had outgrown Stinson’s garage. A wildly successful mousse formulation came next, and the big retailers came calling. Stinson has impeccable instincts, and on realising that the chain store asking to stock her brand wasn’t the right fit for a luxury tan, came up with the idea for a cheaper sister brand that would appeal to a younger, more price-conscious demographic.
Iconic Bronze launched in 2017, and Stinson has continued to innovate, expanding Bellamianta to include cosmetics — a foundation/skincare hybrid is in the works for 2026 — adding ‘tween’ skincare to the Iconic Bronze range just recently.
She’s working on her first retail store, a huge space over two floors in Craigavon’s Rushmere Shopping Centre. It will be a full-circle moment for Stinson, as Rushmere is where she started her make-up career. The store will be two floors of products — “I think people will actually be shocked at the amount the brand has to offer” — with an area for “female-founded Irish brands” and an event space upstairs.
Paying it forward and supporting other women is in Stinson’s DNA. Her mother, Collette McNamee, “a great feminist”, is the firm’s MD (Stinson’s dad runs the warehouse) and Stinson’s role model. “Back in those days, as a female Catholic, she managed to get to the top, which was hard.” Her mum instilled in her the value of “helping other women up the ladder” and Stinson freely gives advice to young entrepreneurs, even if they are her competitor.
“There’s room for everybody at the end of the day, everybody’s entitled to go out there and try for themselves.” Her sage advice is often hard earned. While Stinson says TikTok is “unbelievable for marketing”, a foray into its shop proved to be a different beast. Despite having performed really well on paper — “we sold over a hundred thousand units” — profits weren’t what they should be. Stinson figured out the issue — hidden costs and the site’s demand for frequent offers — and fixed it.
It’s an incredibly altruistic approach, but that’s Stinson all over. She comes across as devoid of ego — perhaps that comes from being one of seven siblings — and is happy to let her employees shine. “I’m not always going to come up with the best ideas, but when you’re employing new talent who are smarter than you, and more creative than you, that’s going to help you. I want people who are more creative than me, who are going to give me ideas. I want people who are smarter than me.”
She’s also incredibly honest, and happily admits to having a “Mary Poppins” who comes from eight to six to mind the girls — “Let’s not lie about it. You need help. And I have help, thank God”.
By necessity, she has become expert at “putting out the fires” that come with the territory of entrepreneurship — covid, new EU rules on tanning formulations, Trump’s tariffs. “You can stand there and cry and let your business fail, or you can make a plan and do something about it. And I think I’ve become quite good at that.”
She has got to this stage fully self-funded but knows that she needs investment to take her beauty empire to the next level. She feels she has “another 10 years of me going the rate that I’m going at now” and if the achievements of the last 10 are anything to go by, I’d wager world domination will be a cinch.
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