The 30 entries on our first Sunday Times Beauty Rich List have built their wealth on products and services ranging from skincare and hair salons to false eyelashes, lipstick and tanning shops.
You will find household names and success stories that are largely untold. Britain has quietly become a hotbed of exciting cosmetics brands harnessing TikTok and Instagram to go global and snatch market share from giants such as L’Oréal and Estée Lauder.
Our list is young and mostly female. Nineteen of those who feature in this research are female; 14 are men. Of the 33 people you will meet, 14 are in their twenties or thirties.
These inspiring leaders haven’t simply amassed fortunes, adding up to nearly £2.2 billion — they are spearheading a big part of our economy. Britain’s personal care and beauty industry contributed £27.2 billion to GDP in 2023, employing 600,000 people. That kind of value is more than skin deep.
1. Charlotte Tilbury, age 52, estimated wealth £350m
Packing for boarding school in East Sussex at 13, Tilbury took something that would set her course for stardom: a family friend had given her a box crammed with make-up. Before long girls at her Rudolf Steiner school were enjoying complimentary makeovers while Tilbury concocted her own cosmetics.
After school Tilbury made her name by working with Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer and other Nineties supermodels.
Frustrated by the quality of beauty products, it wasn’t until 2013 that she launched her eponymous brand. Seven years later a stake sale to the Spanish fashion group Puig valued Charlotte Tilbury Beauty at just under £1 billion. The deal delivered tens of millions of pounds to the queen of British cosmetics and she retains a 23.9 per cent stake, worth at least £317.8 million.
• Hadley Freeman meets Charlotte Tilbury
2. Mark and Mo Constantine, 72 and 71, £249m
It was the supposed hangover cure Alka-Seltzer that gave Mo Constantine the idea for the bath bomb. Her invention has become a fizzing phenomenon for Lush Cosmetics, the eco-friendly retailer she and her husband Mark founded with four others on Poole High Street in the mid-1990s. The Constantines had met in their teens at an all-night party 25 years earlier.
Homeless after a family bust-up, Mark was living in a tent in woodland. He partly attributes his success to his “entrepreneur’s wound”, a hunger to demonstrate his worth to a father who had abandoned him soon after birth. Lush should be worth at least £300 million despite its £28.1 million loss in 2022-23. The Constantines own 56.2 per cent. A separate company owning Lush’s brand and a run of dividends accounts for the rest of their fortune.
3. Sanjay Vadera, 58, £245m
Vadera arrived in the UK aged five after his family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin’s regime.
Years later, while studying at Manchester Polytechnic and working in a menswear shop, he convinced the manager to let him run a concession. That would be the start of his scent distributor Per-Scent and soon afterwards he set up The Fragrance Shop, a retailer with more than 200 sites and stalls.
Vadera’s two businesses booked profits of £20.8 million on record sales of £182.8 million in 2023-24. The group should easily be worth £200 million and has paid out nearly £60 million to Vadera.
4. John Frieda, 73, £150m
Married to the Scottish singer Lulu for 14 years until 1991, Frieda made his money from his Frizz Ease haircare range, sold to a Japanese company in 2002 for £260 million.
Frieda had started a salon in his mid-twenties, attracting clients including Diana, Princess of Wales, and Joanna Lumley. After his split with Lulu he married Avery Agnelli, widow of a Fiat heir. Last September he set up a salon business with his 18-year-old son Jackson.
5. Vishal Karia, 35, £114m
Expelled from school and later diagnosed with ADHD, Karia initially had ambitions to be a lawyer.
After working for his family’s pharmaceuticals firm he launched a venture that would indulge his passion. Affinity Fragrances, the wholesaler he set up in 2016, has become a £116 million linchpin of the beauty industry, supplying high street chains and supermarkets. Karia owns 93 per cent and has received almost £10 million in dividends over the past four years.
He does not regret turning his back on conventional education and considers ADHD to be his “superpower”, helping him to remember the prices of thousands of products.
6= Elliot Isaacs, 53, £100m
A succession of middle-aged women visiting his father’s pharmacy in North Finchley gave Isaacs the idea for Medik8. Many were buying tubes of the vitamin supplement retinol to mask their wrinkles, rather than conventional creams.
Sensing that anti-ageing treatments were ripe for disruption, Isaacs spent days scouring dermatology papers at the British Library before launching Medik8 in 2009. Sales climbed to £45.3 million in 2022-23.
Isaacs sold a majority stake to private equity three years ago in a deal valuing the Hertfordshire-based company at between £150 million and £200 million. He still owns just over 15 per cent of the shares.
6= Sacha Mascolo-Tarbuck and family, 53, £100m
Mascolo-Tarbuck runs the Toni & Guy hair salon chain built by her late father Toni and his brother, Guy. There are more than 450 outlets in nearly 50 countries.
Revenues of the largest UK company have fallen in recent years, leading us to value Toni & Guy cautiously at £100 million. Mascolo-Tarbuck’s husband, James, is the son of the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck.
6= Paige Williams, 32, £100m
Williams grew up with five brothers on a Manchester council estate and left school without qualifications. While working as an assistant at the Selfridges make-up counter she persuaded her grandmother to lend her £20,000 to start a business.
Her brand P Louise sells teen-friendly cosmetics inlcuding Bad B*tch Energy, a potent lip oil duo that comes in colours like “glazed doughnut”. P Louise’s revenues came in at about £65 million in 2024. The company should easily be worth £100 million and Williams owns it all.
9. Susie Ma, 36, £73m
Determined to help her mum pay the bills, Ma began selling face scrubs made from her grandmother’s recipe at Greenwich market when she was a teenager. That was the start of Tropic Skincare, a sustainably sourced label. In 2011 she persuaded Lord Sugar to buy half of her business for £200,000 on The Apprentice. She bought back the stake last year and now owns the whole £70 million brand.
10. Daisy Kalnina, 37, £70m
The Latvian-born entrepreneur worked in her mother’s beauty salon from age 15 and first attempted a double-glazing start-up before opening a nail bar at home; she thought it would be easier to juggle as a single mother of three.
Unimpressed by the polishes available, she launched her own. Her array of 300 vegan and cruelty-free polishes was soon being worn by Jennifer Lopez, Dua Lipa and the Kardashians. After underlying profits of £17.8 million over the past year, The GelBottle should easily be worth £70 million.
11. Frank Taylor and family, 74, £64m
Cable TV and the arrival of DVDs scuppered Taylor’s first business, a chain of 30 video rental stores, so the Scot started again with a chain of tanning shops. Indigo Sun now has more than 100 in Britain. Profits of £7.2 million suggest the Stirling-based business is easily worth £60 million. Taylor and his family own it all.
12. Trinny Woodall, 61, £54m
After battling cocaine addiction in her twenties, Woodall teamed up with Susannah Constantine to offer — at times icy — fashion and styling advice, first through a newspaper column and then the hit BBC series What Not to Wear.
In 2017 Woodall launched her make-up brand Trinny London, quickly landing £2 million of investment from Unilever. Initially online only, the first real shop opened on the King’s Road in London last September.
Annual sales of £56.7 million now justify a £200 million valuation. Woodall still owns at least 25 per cent, with her broadcasting and book sales adding at least another £4 million.
• Skincare secrets of the rich and famous — from Trinny to Maya Jama
13. Jenna Meek, 32, £53m
The Manchester Metropolitan graduate’s first cosmetics start-up Shrine developed from applying glitter paint and jewels at parties and festivals. Paris Hilton and Kylie Jenner were among the customers helping Shrine chalk up profits of more than £1 million on £3.5 million sales.
Meek’s second venture, a 50/50 make-up collaboration with the former model Jess Hunt, has shone all the brighter. Refy should have hit revenues of £45 million last year and is worth £90 million. Meek has another £2.1 million sitting in a separate company and should have done well from selling Shrine.
• Jenna Meek: I learnt my trade at car-boot sales
14= Susan Harmsworth, 79, £50m
ESPA’s moisturisers, eye masks and other luxury treatments are sold in spas worldwide. A deputy editor of Vogue in her youth, Harmsworth was a single mum in her late forties when she started the business from her kitchen with a vision of transforming spas from dour health farms into luxurious retreats.
She still owned more than half the shares in 2017 when ESPA was sold to The Hut Group for more than £100 million.
14= Martin and Gavin Rae, 58 and 56, £50m
Tie-ups with Love Island and celebs including Frankie Bridge have given plenty of volume to sales of Cloud Nine’s hair straighteners, curlers, wands and dryers. Martin Rae set up the outfit in 2009 with his stepfather Robert Powls, a former Vidal Sassoon hairdresser.
Powls has stepped away and Rae is now chairman after 14 years as chief executive; his younger brother Gavin is a non-executive director. The Raes both own almost a third of the £70 million company.
16. Jess Hunt, 28, £46m
A former model with two million Instagram followers, Hunt is the face of the fast-growing make-up brand Refy. She and her business partner Jenna Meek founded it in 2020 after meeting on a photoshoot. Hunt owns half of the shares and has £1.4 million in another company.
17. Mike Harris and family, 84, £42m
Harris started as a hairdresser before founding The Belgravia Centre in 1991. His discreetly named hair-loss clinic treats men and women. With profits a snip over £2 million and turnover consistently above £10 million, the business should easily be worth £25 million. Hefty dividends of about £27 million have been paid over the past ten years.
18. Maxine and Darcy Laceby, 59 and 27, £34m
A stay-at-home mum for 25 years, Maxine Laceby was divorced and past 50 when she teamed up with her eldest daughter Darcy to launch Absolute Collagen. She sold jewellery and remortgaged her home to get things started. “If it goes tits up, we will have to sell the house and buy a smaller one,” she told her children.
Fortunately, annual sales of their anti-ageing supplements have hit nearly £26 million. Four years ago a private equity investment valued the business at £43 million; growth since then suggests it is now worth at least £60 million. Laceby and her daughters still own 56.9 per cent of the shares.
19= Elliot Barton, 33, £32m / Charlotte Tiplady, 35, £32m
Ariana Grande, Paris Hilton and Nicki Minaj are among the A-listers to have worn Barton and Tiplady’s false eyelashes.
The college friends set up Tatti Lashes on Merseyside in 2017, designing and importing their own ready-to-wear lashes from China. They used Instagram to approach celebrity make-up artists, realising that if stars were wearing their products others would follow.
After profits of nearly £6 million in 2023-24 Tatti Lashes should easily be worth £70 million. Barton and Tiplady own nearly half each.
21. Georgie Cleeve and family, 48, £28m
In 2009, Cleeve left her career as a travel journalist to start Oskia, inspired by an unusual suggestion from her father to look at using ingredients found in horse supplements. Her cleansers, moisturisers and masks are now sold in more than a dozen countries.
Oskia publishes little financial information but should be worth at least £10 million. Her father sold his business Natural Animal Feeds two years ago. Taking account of the proceeds of that deal, an investment company with £7.5 million of net assets and a grade II listed, 17th-century, Renaissance-themed farmhouse should take the Cleeves to at least £25 million.
22= Oliver Mennell, 43, £25m / Nicola Elliott, 47, £25m
At 22, Mennell was working in private equity when he quit to team up with Elliott, then editor of Glamour magazine. Their fathers had met while running businesses in the motor world and the families dined on Christmas Eve.
They started Neom, which initially sold candles and now produces natural oils, balms, cleansers and haircare products. He focuses on the finances, she the products, and they each own about 25 per cent of the £80 million venture. (Elliott’s other half, Jon Holt, is the UK chief executive of KPMG.)
24. Mark Curry, 43, £17m
Curry has recently returned as chief executive of The Inkey List, the fast-growing skincare brand he founded in 2018 with his fellow former Boots colleague Colette Laxton. Powered by TikTok, sales topped £75 million in 2023 and have kept climbing. Now majority-owned by Unilever, Curry holds about 10 per cent of the £150 million brand. He and Laxton are engaged.
25= Jamie Genevieve, 31, £15m
Genevieve was an assistant on the Estée Lauder counter at Debenhams in Glasgow when she started sharing her make-up artistry on Instagram. When followers began visiting her at the store she decided to become a full-time influencer.
Her kitchen became a makeshift studio and she hired her bricklayer boyfriend Jack McCann, now her husband, as an editor. In 2020 she launched her vegan make-up brand Vieve, two years later selling a 40 per cent stake for £5.5 million. Genevieve, real name Jamie Grant, owns about half of the £20 million brand.
25= Jo Malone, 61, £15m
Raised on a council estate in southeast London, Malone left school at 15 without qualifications when her mother suffered a stroke and required care. After working as a beautician from home, she began making bath oils and in her early thirties launched her eponymous candle and hand cream brand.
Five years later, in 1999, Estée Lauder bought Jo Malone London for “undisclosed millions”. She is unlikely to have made a vast fortune from it because the business was a fraction of the size it is today.
Malone was creative director until 2006, despite being treated for breast cancer. A legal tie-up obliged her to wait five years before she could launch Jo Loves, the body lotion and perfume brand she runs today. She now lives in Dubai.
25= Freddy Ward, 36, £15m
Ward says he settles disagreements with his business partner on the tennis court. He and Charlie Bowes-Lyon started Wild by selling refillable deodorants made of natural ingredients but soon moved on to eco lip balms and body washes. Wild’s products are available in Tesco, Waitrose and Holland & Barrett, helping to drive revenues up by 80 per cent over the past year.
Wild should easily be worth £50 million and Ward owns about 26 per cent, a few points more than Bowes-Lyon. He also claims to be better at tennis.
28. Colette Laxton, 38, £12m
Laxton launched The Inkey List with Mark Curry in 2018. She should have done well from selling down her stake but still owns 6.2 per cent.
29= Ama Amo-Agyei, 28, £10m
Amo-Agyei started her natural haircare business Plantmade with £100 after being made redundant in the pandemic. The stress of that recruitment job had given the Ghanaian-born entrepreneur hair loss but she was unimpressed with mainstream treatments that often relied on chemicals and steroids.
She began researching and making natural remedies, sharing them on Instagram. Followers asked if they could buy her treatments and so she made an experimental batch of 50 bottles, selling each for £9.99. The same product now costs £35 and she owns all of the £10 million brand on which it was built.
29= Charlie Bowes-Lyon, 35, £10m
A former head boy at Ampleforth College who comes from the same family as the late Queen Elizabeth’s mother, Bowes-Lyon launched the eco-friendly cosmetics brand Wild in 2019 with his friend Freddy Ward. Bowes-Lyon owns just over 17 per cent of the shares.
How we compiled this list
The Sunday Times Beauty Rich List provides conservative estimates of the wealth of leading figures in the British beauty industry in early 2025.
Although the main Sunday Times Rich List often values companies conservatively — either on net assets or on a multiple of, say, ten times annual profits — fast-growing beauty brands have been sold on the basis of a multiple of their sales. Some of our valuations are therefore higher than if they were to operate in other industries.
We have excluded people where a beauty company accounts for less than 25 per cent of their estimated wealth.
