Beauty au Naturel : The Body Shop Boutiques Are Products of Environmental Concern, Founder Says

Anita Roddick, founder of Sussex, England-based The Body Shop International, is a rebel with a cause in the beauty business.

Indeed, she’s been called the Estee Lauder of the ‘90s, but she’s outspokenly anti-glamour. In fact, the words beauty and anti-aging are on her company’s official nix list.

Sure, her most famous client is Princess Di and it’s true, she says, Prince Charles uses her gentle skin lotions.

Yes, she has 600 The Body Shop boutiques scattered worldwide. She was in Southern California several weeks ago to visit her newest, in Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza.

But Roddick doesn’t advertise or sheathe her natural products in pricey packaging. And in fact, it’s a struggle just to get her to discuss her products.

Simply put, she’s out to save the world. If it takes aloe vera moisture creams, banana-laden hair conditioners and talking about the Royal Family to do it, so be it.

Now at age 48, she calls herself a “bloody ‘60s humanitarian” and looks the part with her tousled brown curls, makeup-free face, and her multicolored T-shirt-and-leggings uniform.

Competitors call her a shrewd businesswoman who knows how to use social causes as a public-relations gimmick. She bristles at such charges.

“If I can do something that changes lives and helps change the world, I’m happy,” she says. “If my company makes money along the way, all the better.”

Priorities, Roddick will tell you, struck a nerve with the consumer and turned the business that she started in 1976 in a 300-square-foot storefront into a half-billion-dollar corporation. She will use neither ingredients derived from animals nor products tested on them. She insists that her products be biodegradable and that their manufacture be energy-efficient. Recycling is essential.

She pays her employees to do community service. And her company channels thousands of dollars into efforts to save rain forests, feed the homeless and aid earthquake victims and Romanian orphans.

“It would very boring to devote the rest of my life to finding new face creams,” says Roddick. She repeatedly challenges her cosmetics industry colleagues to “stop hyping their consumers. There’s no such thing as a new moisturizer formula--they all make your skin soft.”

So does she stick with the existing moisturizers she sells? No way.

Roddick explains: “I ask specific questions when we consider a new product: Can its ingredients be collected in a Third World country so we can create trade that will benefit that country?

“Has its use been part of an existing culture? Will it make for interesting conversation in the shops? If the answers are all yes, that’s much more interesting to me than a new chemical formula.”

She is now working with Pueblo Indians in New Mexico to buy powdered corn to use in various products.

Her formula apparently is working. Analysts in London and New York call The Body Shop concept the future of the cosmetics industry.

Her little green boutiques are in every good-sized town in England. They’re also in the Arctic, Japan, Bangkok and throughout Europe.

Leonard Lauder, CEO of Estee Lauder, was so taken with Roddick’s stores that last year he launched Origins, a natural cosmetics collection that is an obvious imitation.

“Plenty of people are following our lead, but if they have a fat-cat mentality it won’t work,” Roddick says. “Consumers are responding to our values as well as our products.

“I’m constantly fighting the fat-cat mentality at our headquarters,” she says. She cites the case of executives who started expecting bigger and better company cars as the corporate profits increased.

“The biggest car we offer is a Volkswagen Golf. Now we have incentives for people to ride bikes to work, and we built bicycle sheds.”

However, a bit of the gentry surfaces. When she traveled through Los Angeles recently, it was by chauffeur-driven town car. She owns a four-acre Georgian mansion outside London, a 17th-Century house in Scotland and a flat in London.

She and husband Gordon own 33% of the corporation’s stock; she is managing director and he is chief executive officer. Since 1988, about 40 The Body Shop boutiques have opened in the United States--six in New York City.

The first West Coast store opened last year in Portland, Ore. Now the California onslaught begins. Stores are scheduled to open in San Diego in June and Topanga Plaza on July 1.