At THE GLOSS Magazine’s Beauty of Beauty event at The Westbury Hotel, Trinny Woodall and Beauty Editor Sarah Halliwell discussed the secrets to great skin, adapting your skincare routine as you age and breaking bad habits, including an addiction to fake tan …
“My overriding wish is that women will have a great relationship with their skin,” said Trinny Woodall told THE GLOSS Beauty Editor Sarah Halliwell at The Beauty of Beauty Event. “I meet thousands of women each year and the first thing I notice about them is their skin. I now believe that most women have skin dysmorphia, and they hide their skin under lots of heavy make-up. The key to Trinny London is to ‘cover less and shine more.’”
“When I was a teenager, I had bad acne and spent my pocket money at beauty counters,” she revealed. “Before that, my mother’s answer to every single skin product had been Pond’s cream. Clinique introduced me to the concept of a beauty routine with its cleanse, tone and moisturising products. I would hop from brand to brand – even asking for incredibly expensive Erno Laszlo products for Christmas and birthdays. I found a few gems. I remain faithful an iconic Rene Guinot mask, for instance, with its lavender and camphor smell.”
Trinny was honest too about her own early beauty faux pas – from sunbathing without SPF – “olive oil and tinfoil!” to an over-reliance on fake tan. “The ingredients in fake tan are naturally dehydrating – so then we do layer lots of moisturiser over it. But that kills our skin. It is like a nail that’s had a lot of gel on it, it’s died. I can recognise a fake-tan cycle!”
From those early teenage years, until she was 28, every six months she would invest in a brand. It was a time where there were no “doctor” brands and there were no inkey lists (the list of ingredients on the bottle). There was literally no way of knowing what was in the bottle. When they appeared on packaging, she would study the list of ingredients, finding out what they did. Years of this research ultimately led to her founding Trinny London in 2017.
Its purpose: to give everyone the tools they need to feel their best in a simple, streamlined solution. As a brand, Trinny London broke the mould in its approach to beauty, not least in prioritising realism over aspiration, appealing to older women especially, and never using professional models in marketing campaigns. The simple, clever stackable little make-up pots make Trinny London products the most portable make-up line in existence, and the development of a skincare line, with products formulated in her own Trinny London lab, was the logical next step. Now, products like Plump Up and Overnight Clarity have the same devoted following as her iconic BFF Skin Perfector with SPF30.
Trinny has built a brand around a positive approach to health and wellbeing. She doesn’t use or like the term “anti-ageing”. “The key to having great skin is to know our skin,” she said. “We need to become familiar with it, to feel it, to know what’s going on with our hormones, how they impact our skin. Skin changes every 28 days. If you feel your skin is dry, you might need to exfoliate, rather than add more products. Layering on copious amounts of moisturiser as we all do is like polishing a table with dust on it, and we have to get the dust off. Exfoliating correctly is so important, as is cleaning our faces effectively.”
“If we know what type of skin we have, then we know what ingredients we need to clean it,” she explained. You need to have clean skin before you apply a cream, or a serum, any product, otherwise it amounts to putting money down the loo. If you use an oily cleanser, but don’t remove that properly, you won’t get the benefit of the product that comes after it. Use a cleanser that will properly clean your skin. Now you have a canvas.”
SPF is non-negotiable: “Always wear SPF! All the skincare we use is about repair – wearing an SPF is the only thing that is preventative.” While cleansing, exfoliating and adding some Vitamin C can add vibrancy to any complexion. Key investment products from Trinny London include the Be Your Best Enzyme Balm Cleanser, especially good for normal to dry skin. For addressing fine lines and a dull complexion, Trinny London’s Tiptoe In is perfect for first timers as an exfoliant. Trinny also advocates adding a Vitamin C serum to our beauty routines. Trinny London’s Boost Up gives visibly brighter, glowing skin but, warned Trinny, it is not for first time users or those with sensitive skin, due to its 30 per cent strength. She recommends Medik8 C-Tetra Serum for beginners.
While Sarah and Trinny chatted, Trinny London make-up artists, Kellieann and Courtney provided a masterclass in two easily achievable make-up looks – a modern, clean daytime look and a quick and easy lip colour change for evening, each using Trinny’s MatchToMe system which matches make-up shades to skin colour.
Book a one-to-one consultation with the Trinny London team at Brown Thomas Dublin and Planet Beauty, Clarendon Street, Dublin; book through this link.
Where to start with the Trinny London collection for day-to-day wear? A stackable pot of essentials would include Miracle Blur, a skin smoothing formula, which blends into the skin for a seamless base. The Eye2Eye cream-based eye shadow that’s perfect for everyday wear, the Lip Glow in multiple shades with a gorgeously buildable tint and Lip2Cheek, the multitasking lip and cheek colour. The Right Light is a fabulously subtle cream-based highlighter while the Golden Glow is the easily transportable bronzer you never knew you needed. Shop ’til you drop at Brown Thomas now.
Photography: Conor Healy
