Trinny Woodall tells Marie Kelly how she built Trinny London from a niche British beauty brand into a global cosmetics company, and pays tribute to the Irish team members who helped make it happen.
Trinny Woodall appears on our video call sheathed in silver sequins from shoulder to thumb, a navy sleeveless top tempering the disco ball glitter of her long, elegant arms. Devoted followers of the Trinny London founder may have clocked a shift in her style over the past couple of years: more neutrals, less neon; slimmer shoes, leaner silhouettes. But at 61, sequins remain the one signature she will never surrender.
Perhaps that’s because they capture her so completely. Sequins embody playfulness and joy, qualities Woodall has in abundance. They also defy conventional daywear codes, and Woodall has rarely been one to follow rules. But most of all, their light-reflecting sparkle falls onto everyone in a room, and this is Woodall’s real talent – lifting the women around her.
An anecdote from her recent trip to Australia sums it up. “I can be ruthless with hairdressers,” reveals Woodall. “Along comes Sophia and there was something incredible about this 22-year-old’s quiet confidence. She said to me, ‘Tonight, Trinny, I want to do an up-do’. I was facing the window and couldn’t see the mirror and when she’d finished she was waiting to see what I thought and I just knew I needed to road-test it, and I felt good that night. I have to give her such credit because she was taking a risk, doing something different, with someone who can be quite intimidating.”
In fashion and beauty, Woodall wields the kind of fairy godmother power Oprah has long had over our bookshelves: her seal of approval can turn a product into a sell-out and a newcomer into one to watch. Her admission that she can be intimidating is a disarming confession from a woman who has built a €240 million beauty business on being a virtual BFF to women everywhere. Even the product names reinforce this; the Trinny London range of make-up/skincare hybrids plays on the acronym, leaning into its founder’s persona as the woman who has your back.
On paper, the beauty mogul is certainly formidable: the former star of noughties TV make-over show What Not To Wear is an entrepreneur, CEO, self-made multimillionaire and style icon. But on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, she leads with the empathy, acceptance, honesty and humour of an old friend. She broadcasts live from her bathroom and from her bed and shows up on social media bare-faced and frizzy-haired, and her Trinny Tribe members behave less like customers and more like cheerleaders.
Woodall’s people skills rival her business acumen. “I’m not a softly spoken, ultra-feminine woman. I have an element of being a bit of an alpha male and I love being a kick-ass businesswoman, but I am sensitive and I think my success is partly down to having a sense, when I enter a room, of which woman most needs help but is probably least likely to ask for it.”
She believes she shares this trait with her right-hand man, Dubliner John Corcoran, chief makeup artist for Trinny London and her own personal makeup artist. “John has a very high EQ [emotional intelligence] and a very strong intuition. I’ve learned a bit from John and John has learned a lot from me. We spent 11 days in Australia recently, beginning at 6am, finishing at midnight, with one half day off. We were jetlagged as fuck and had only a few hours sleep and John would be the first person to see me in the morning. He’s in Thailand now, lying on a beach, and I sent him an email saying ‘I couldn’t wish to wake up with somebody better because you bring this joy into the room’.”
Corcoran clearly passed the Anna Wintour hiring test. At a recent breakfast for 12 business leaders attended by Woodall, Vogue’s global chief content officer revealed her golden rule of recruitment. “She said, ‘During an interview, ask yourself whether the candidate will bring a smile to your face when they walk into your office, and if the answer is no, don’t hire them’,” explains Woodall.
I’m not a softly spoken, ultra-feminine woman, but I am sensitive and I think my success is partly down to having a sense of which woman most needs help but is probably least likely to ask for it.
Smiles at Trinny London HQ were especially wide last month when the company celebrated its ninth birthday. In that time, Trinny London has grown from a small British beauty brand based around stackable, portable product pots to a global cosmetics company, which Woodall believes is on course to be the leading brand in the “prestige market” for women over 40.
“That’s my ambition and it’s a huge ambition. But I’d say in the UK, we are almost that brand. In Australia, we are considered nearly that. Seven or eight percent of our business is American and that’s just organic growth, so there’s much more to do. In Ireland, we’ve had nice growth this year and I like our relationship with Brown Thomas because it’s a good department store,” she says.
The Trinny London range has crept steadily from the face to the neck, décolletage and now the hands. Its most recent launch, Take Back Time Overnight Hand Transformation, is a concentrate and microneedle treatment designed to restore volume, fade dark spots and smooth crepey skin. Woodall is extremely anti the phrase anti-ageing. “I can’t bear it,” she says. “I believe that life is about evolution, not reinvention, and that we should enjoy the decade we’re in. So if we’re trying to turn back time, it portrays and makes us feel that we’re not comfortable with who we are today.”
The phrase Take Back Time is a subtle but deliberate shift from the cliché of ‘turn back time’. “By saying take back time, we’re saying we’re going to sort out this problem so you can take back time for yourself and not think about it any more,” she explains. “I just want women to look in the mirror and think, do I look alive, full of energy, capable of doing anything? That, I think, is the most important thing.”
If the launch of Take Back Time matches the success of the brand’s first Plump Up Microneedle two years ago, which sold out in six weeks, Woodall and her chief innovation officer, Irishwoman Claire Byrne, will be more than pleased. Byrne has more than 20 years’ experience in cosmetics research, development and product innovation at brands including Oriflame and Neal’s Yard Remedies. She joined Trinny London in 2018 and now develops its award-winning skincare hand in hand with Woodall. “With Claire, we have developed some really good products together. I come along with a crazy idea, she takes it and translates it,” explains Woodall, who describes Byrne as “a mother hen to her team”.
Irish women, Woodall says, are funny. English women are “a bit pessimistic but realistic”, Australians “candid and blunt” and Americans “very optimistic”. “Every Irish person we have in the business has humour. And there’s an amazing Irish woman on social media, who discovered our products. She lives on a farm, and, oddly, she has lovely handbags. She posts these really badly lit videos of herself discovering a skincare routine, and she brings me such joy. What I love is the fun of her taking care of herself in a way she never has before. I love seeing that woman who thinks, I’m not going to be my mum at 55 in my plaid skirt and my flat sensible walking shoes. I’m going to be present, I’m going to wear sequins, I’m going to be noisy and I’m not going to worry what people think. I would love it if we, as a brand, could help women not worry about what people think.”
This intention runs through everything Trinny London does: from the Elevator Pitch, which offers female-founded businesses a place on the shelves of its Chelsea flagship store (Irish haircare brand The Smooth Company was chosen in 2024 and stocked in May 2025 for six months), to its Game Changers campaign, which stars Kildare woman Jess Colivet. Their real-life stories of resilience and reinvention range from Jess’s journey through cancer, to another woman’s discovery of inner confidence, to a third’s change of career in midlife.
“Jess’s story is phenomenal,” says Woodall. “To me, it’s a story of struggle and evolution. She has been through a lot. If you saw her today, you might think she was entitled, privileged, lovely, but the journey she’s been on is extraordinary. I love that we have women like Jess, women we hold really close. When the team went to Ireland to interview her at home, it was really special. I didn’t meet Jess until the shoot day, but as soon as the rushes [video footage] came back and I saw her, I thought, this is our Irish woman.”
Her one bugbear? The Irish love affair with fake tan. “I probably tell more Irish women, including Irish women in Australia, than any other women to give up the fake tan,” she says. “Three weekends ago, I was in a car with two very funny Irish people and we just had this chat about the need for Irish women to look like they live in the south of France.”
Maybe the answer is to swap fake tan for sequins.
Originally published in The Sunday Times Ireland, November 2026