The first Body Shop opened in my home town of Brighton in 1976. It recently escaped the threat of immediate closure, unlike many others, but its future is still uncertain. The closed stores may yet reopen, but thebodyshop.com is still trading, and I believe passionately that it should be shopped at and saved. Here are just a handful of the many reasons why.
If ethical and sustainable initiatives in retail are now mainstream, it’s because the Body Shop made them so. “You have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else,” wrote founder Anita Roddick in 1992. And that’s precisely what she did. The Body Shop’s radicalism didn’t just change the beauty industry, it changed every consumer industry. It was among the first companies of any type to receive B Corp certification (there are now more than 8,000) – an official acknowledgment that it treated people, profit and planet with equal importance.
In 1986, for Greenpeace’s Save the Whales campaign, the Body Shop was the first national retailer to transform window displays from selling spaces into billboards for non-profit activism. As a pioneer of ethically sourced, indigenous natural ingredients and fairtrade practices, the Body Shop was among the first to audit itself on its sustainability, social values and animal protection, encouraging other companies to follow suit.
In 2021, it was the first beauty retailer to adopt “open hiring”, as a way to recruit marginalised people and improve social mobility. This year, it became the first global beauty brand to be certified by the Vegan Society, and its activism against animal testing is widely felt to have contributed significantly to the 2013 EU-wide ban. It has always walked its talk.
I say all this as a reminder that the Body Shop is not just a beauty brand. It’s among the most influential and culturally transformative businesses in British history. Who over 35 doesn’t remember multicoloured bath pearls, Raspberry Ripple bath gel, cocoa butter everything, the heady fug of White Musk perfume and Morello Cherry lip balm in a teenage snog?
I’m not suggesting we rally out of nostalgia or pity; it’s about deciding who we are as consumers. And the choice is easy because the Body Shop still makes brilliant beauty products: luxurious fairtrade body butters, efficacious vitamin E skincare, creamy banana conditioner you have to resist licking off your split ends, and some of the best cleansers and sunscreens on the market. The Body Shop matters to beauty, and to Britain. It deserves to survive and thrive.
• This article was amended on 19 May 2024. The Body Shop store in Brighton has not closed as an earlier version stated.
