Caroline Hirons: 'I’ve got the time, the energy and plenty of HRT to take on the government'

Caroline Hirons is angry. As one of the most authoritative voices in the beauty industry, with half a million followers on Instagram, and 240,000 subscribers on YouTube, the 51 year-old skincare expert has joined the call to fully reopen the beauty sector and for the Government to provide urgent financial support for the largely female workforce.

For the past two months, here at The Telegraph, we have been calling for the reopening of the whole industry with our Why Can’t I Work campaign.

For those unaware of the plight of the beauty industry over the past four months, let me get you up to speed. The sector was initially grouped in with hairdressers and barbers for a July 4 reopening, but kicked out of the category just the week before. Then on July 13, only some beauty services – treatments from below-the-neck – were allowed to re-start, leaving around 70 percent of salons still unable to open.

The Government finally gave businesses a full reopening date of August 1 – only to “apply the brakes” again the day before, due to rising infection rates. And this is all set to the backdrop of no government grants or bailouts for the £28.4bn beauty industry, which is largely female-staffed and female-served, and experts estimate will shrink by 30 percent as a result of the lockdown.

Enter Hirons, and her hundreds of thousands of followers. “I was incensed by the announcement on Friday 31 [July] that salons couldn’t reopen the next day,” Hirons tells me, passionately. “I was so angry I was levitating. I knew something had to be done to get some money to these women.”

Within a few hours, Hirons, along with some industry friends, set up Beauty Backed, a Go Fund Me page to raise money for the Hair & Beauty Charity, who had already been giving donations to those in the industry struggling to make ends meet.

As of Friday, Beauty Backed had raised a whopping £300,000 through personal donations and money from larger beauty companies. In fact, it raised more in two days than the charity usually receives in an entire year.

Although she’s been “doing my best Bob Geldof impressions and nagging for money,” it’s the gender discrimination that has most infuriated Hirons.

“The Government doesn’t get it. We’re used to the snobbery towards the beauty industry, but now that snobbery is affecting people’s lives. We’re brushed off for being frivolous, as if standing on a golf course all day isn’t frivolous.

“How embarrassing is it for the Government that as an industry worth almost £30 billion, we’re having to rally together to make money for a charity to help [it] out. Can you ever imagine that for the motor industry? Of course the Government would bail them out.”

Beauty Backed has also received donations from as far as California and Australia. “How embarrassing is that, Sonia? They cannot believe people have been completely left behind because they don’t have a penis. I’ve got the time, the energy and plenty of HRT to take on the Government.”

You’d have to be a fool to cross Hirons – the straight-talking, no-nonsense mother-of-four doesn’t suffer them gladly, as you can probably tell. The first of 10 rules listed in her private Facebook group, Caroline Hirons Skincare Freaks (some 54,400 members strong), is: “Don’t be a d***.”

As someone who didn’t discover her vocation until her late-20s, and who didn’t become a megastar in her industry until midlife, she’s not one to tiptoe around trying to please everyone, or to take to heart the kind of abuse women with a large public profile inevitably, depressingly suffer.

Hirons’ mother taught her she could do whatever she wanted, and this pretty much turned out to be true. Although both her mother and grandmother had worked in the beauty industry, Hirons had no plans to follow them.

Born in Liverpool, her family moved to the US when she was four and then back to England when she was about 10. Hirons moved to London at 17 and worked as a secretary, a personal assistant and in retail before, in need of a part-time role while she raised young children, she found work on the Aveda counter in Harvey Nichols.

“I didn’t think of beauty as a job until I fell into it, and on the first day I was like, ‘ooh, I like this’,” she recalls. “On the second day I was thinking ‘I could *do* this’.”

So she enrolled on a course at the Steiner Beauty School in central London, attending night classes while working. In 2009 she launched her own consultation business, and the following year her blog, which took off in a way she could never have imagined.

While her husband Jim became a stay-at-home dad to their children (now aged 15 to 28) at home in west London, her career went stratospheric. Dubbed “the skincare queen” by her global army of fans, the hype is in this case justified: a single social media post from her can lead to a product selling out worldwide, a phenomenon the industry calls “the Caroline Effect”.

Her recently published debut book, Skincare, went straight to number one in the UK book charts, selling just under 33,000 copies in launch week. Apart from face wipes (which she has said “should have a label attached: ‘Don’t be a lazy cow’,” one of her bête noires is the term ‘anti-ageing’.

“I remember when Dior brought out a cream that was for the over-35s [in 2017] and Cara Delevingne [then aged 25] was the model. We were all like, ‘why would I buy this cream? If you don’t trust the cream to show it on an older face, I’m not interested. I fully embrace my age. I don’t judge, but I don’t understand people who are terrified of telling people their age.”

Yet she insists every woman has a right to choose whether to have “work” done, and not be judged for that, either. Last autumn Hirons reportedly had her first “tweakments” herself. Does society have double standards: expecting women to look young forever, yet deriding them for having cosmetic procedures in pursuit of this goal?

“Yeah, and I also think women can be our own worst enemies,” she says. “Women can be the harshest critics of other women... [They] will say ‘I’m really disappointed you’ve had Botox,’ as if they have ownership over you. It’s your body, you do whatever you want, it’s no-one else’s business.”

If this irreverent, everywoman approach has won her very many acolytes, a post of hers in which she talked about the menopause became one of her most viewed, which she suggests is telling of how “women are desperate to be validated.” “I am a menopausal woman so I’m very much aware of what the struggles were,” she says.

“The HRT [hormone replacement therapy] I was on from the GP, they just went, ‘that’s no longer available.’ Imagine if it was viagra? There would be uproar. They don’t care. We are second class citizens. If menopause happened to men, HRT would be available in pubs.”

The problem is women often don’t wish to cause a fuss, she says, which she believes the Government have tried to take advantage of with the delayed reopening of the beauty industry. “They don’t know the industry and they’re ignorant... The fact they opened pubs before beauty rooms we will never forget. I think it’s a function of the fact the Government is dominated by white, wealthy, middle-aged men.”

But now, thanks to Beauty Backed and the Telegraph’s Why Can’t I Work campaign, the industry is fighting back. So does she believe the Government's latest promise that all beauty services can resume from August 15? “I can tell you one thing,” says Hirons. “There’ll be World War III if they don’t.” I believe her.

Skincare by Caroline Hirons. Buy the e-book now for £9.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514

Additional reporting by Rosa Silverman