Strolling into The Physique Store was like “getting into a candy store”. It “actually made your mouth water,” says Stasia Smith-Turpin, who would head to the Lancaster retailer after faculty with pals when she was 16 within the 90s. She recollects how a wave of perfume would hit her as she entered the store, and he or she would take a look at and scent the soaps, lotions and potions whereas planning learn how to spend her pocket cash.
Smith-Turpin, 48, would spray herself with dewberry fragrance – the scent of summer season berries – earlier than using the bus dwelling. In the future, to her mom’s horror, she utilized an excessive amount of (“my arms have been actually greasy!”) and “apparently she may scent me from the bus cease on the backside of the hill,” she says.
Since The Physique Store was based in 1976, it has served as a gateway to adolescence for generations of younger folks like Smith-Turpin. Now she and different customers really feel disappointment and remorse because the retailer collapses into administration in a transfer that’s prone to result in vital retailer closures and job losses.
“It was the beginnings of a scented awakening for many teenage women, and my god did we scent – stunning, however actually robust,” says Smith-Turpin, now a administration guide in Hampton.
Nevertheless it wasn’t simply the merchandise that attracted Smith-Turpin to The Physique Store. It stood for one thing: moral consumption, environmentally sustainable components, an abhorrence of animal testing. The shop “opened my eyes to most of the political points I nonetheless really feel strongly about at the moment,” she says.
Smith-Turpin purchased a e-book on vegetarianism from The Physique Store across the time she stopped consuming meat at 16. “It was the spark that made me go and discover out extra,” she says.
The Physique Store within the late Seventies represented the peak of cool, recollects Helen Gunn, a 64-year-old retired occupational therapist in Herefordshire. “There weren’t any retailers prefer it on the time,” she says. “I bear in mind the scrumptious smells of apple, dewberry and grapefruit.”
She additionally favored how the enterprise, which now has greater than 200 UK shops, was a mannequin for girls, and the way the founder, Anita Roddick, believed pure cosmetics might be feminist. Gunn “actually admired the best way she ran her enterprise in a male-dominated world. She was a profitable girl in an age the place it was uncommon for girls to make headway in any enterprise.”
She provides, “I really feel actually unhappy that it has foundered.”
Roddick ultimately offered up in 2006 to L’Oréal and the corporate was ultimately purchased by the personal fairness agency Aurelius Group final 12 months in a cut-price deal.
In 1985, Sally-Ann Fawcett remembers making use of for a job at The Physique Store in Scarborough. “The competitors was ferocious,” she says. “Everybody needed to work in such a cool, fashionable store, and the group interview at a five-star native lodge was akin to a magnificence pageant.”
Fawcett, 56, was gutted to not be employed. “We have been all so envious of those that have been profitable,” she says. “It actually was the place to be.” Each applicant was given a product as a thanks, and he or she received a banana shampoo. “It was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted 40 years since that day,” Fawcett says.
Lara Callister, 42, from the Isle of Man, started visiting The Physique Store as a teen within the 90s. “I beloved the entire ethos and magnificence,” she says, including that she was interested in its robust values of accountable consumption and anti-animal testing stance.
“The precise merchandise themselves have been so aromatic and actually helpful, I adored their morello cherry lip balm, fuzzy peach and dewberry scented merchandise and peppermint foot lotion,” she says.
However Callister says she visited much less after the chain’s 2006 sale to L’Oréal, after which it grew to become “bland and uninviting.” She is “very unhappy” however not shocked to listen to that it has referred to as in directors. “Asset stripping has been talked about and it simply leaves you with that sinking feeling of one other empty store for the excessive road,” she says.
Hilary Ellis, a 66-year-old semi-retired profession coach, lives in Hove, not removed from the primary ever Physique Store, which opened in Brighton in 1976.
On the time it felt like an “eco-conscious emporium of magnificence merchandise – nowhere else had toiletries, cosmetics and wellbeing merchandise beneath one roof,” she says.
The attention shadows have been amongst Ellis’ favorite merchandise – they have been reasonably priced, refined and cruelty-free – in addition to the important oils in little glass tubes. Ellis travelled round for work, “so I carried them in all places,” she says, with the lavender serving to her sleep on planes or in lodges.
“All of it went downhill when Anita Roddick died” in 2007, Ellis says. “She was an entrepreneur with a revolutionary moral method.”
After being offered to L’Oréal in 2006, the corporate was purchased by the sweetness large Natura in 2017 earlier than its personal fairness acquisition in 2023.
Ellis believes now could be the time “we’d like somebody to make a recent begin for reasonably priced moral magnificence on our excessive streets.”
By Jem Bartholomew
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