Back in the 80s, skin care guru Liz Earle was one of the earliest pioneers of superfoods and juicing. Now, having moved out of skincare, she’s bringing inner beauty to Battersea...
I am due to meet Liz Earle, beauty entrepreneur and wellbeing guru, on a drizzly afternoon in May. Trailing up to town to the offices of Liz’s PR in Soho, I am conscious of the fact that I am about to meet a woman who is not only tremendously successful but also known for her enduring good looks and, well, beauty.
I am not disappointed when she bustles into the meeting room, apologising politely for keeping me waiting.
Dressed from head to toe in pale grey, her Jimmy Choo suede stilettos, tailored Jaeger dress and Paul Smith silk cardigan (“it’s very vintage”) ooze style and finesse. Her skin is soft and unlined, her long hair flowing and tastefully tinted with blonde highlights while her nails are perfectly oval with a French polish.
Liz is perhaps most renowned for her eponymous skincare range, which she famously launched with just four products and the help of Kim Buckland, a former executive working for hairdresser John Frieda on a shopping channel back in 1995.
Fifteen years later and a global brand, whose flagship product is the innovative Cleanse and Polish Hot Cloth Cleanser, the company was sold to Avon. Kim and other shareholders left the business although Liz is still “very much connected to it”.
When she first took the health and beauty world by storm back in the 1980s, Liz was at the forefront of a new way of thinking. She wrote books about essential oils and juicing and was a familiar face on the telly, urging us to live well.
“I was seen as being a bit of a crank…” she laughs.
Despite now confessing that at the time she was “a teetotal, vegan, macrobiotic with very little social life” she nevertheless got Britons thinking, perhaps for the first time, about what we consumed and why.
“For me, beauty has always been this two-way approach; it’s what we put on the skin but it’s also what we put in our bodies to create great skin cells from the inside that counts,” she says, clearly still passionate.
The sale of the Liz Earle brand, which coincided with her fifth pregnancy, allowed her to return to her wellbeing roots. She set up a charity, Live Twice, which aims to “empower people to have a second chance” and desperate to get back to writing, she set up Liz Earle Wellbeing “as a hub, if you like, an umbrella for all the areas I wanted to write about, because the common thread is wellbeing, about feeling good”.
A website and magazine soon followed and now an actual Liz Earle Wellbeing HQ near Battersea Park.
“The beauty company became so successful so quickly that it became all-embracing and I stopped writing books and making TV programmes. It’s nice now to take a breath and revisit the good food things that I was doing so long ago.
“Wellbeing Studios will be my business base. I want to replicate a programme I used to do called Liz Earle Lifestyle, which came from my home in Putney. It was a bit like Cluedo, with Linda Evangelista in the bathroom, Kelly Hoppen in the dining room and Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen…
"We’re going to do Lunch with Liz and there’ll be lots of live TV, plus the magazine, and the website and perhaps later we might invite people to join us for lunch or produce a workshop.”
With so much work going on and in development, I can hardly imagine how Liz also manages to factor in three days in London (“I could never leave my London fix”), as well as four days in the West Country on her organic farm.
All that, alongside maintaining a happy marriage to photographer Patrick Drummond and being a mother to five children, aged between twenty-four and five, three of whom live on the farm, while a son is at university and her eldest daughter, Lily, 24, has just joined the Wellbeing team as digital editor.
“I have a great Italian au pair and my husband is on the farm most of the time,” she assures me. “We have a rule that one of us, as much as we can, is always there so we split it. If I’m not physically there then we might eat our supper together over Skype or Facetime.
“Life is different now. The role of carer does seem to fall so often on women but nowadays you use technology in a different way. You can work wherever you are, do your emails late at night. My children look at me aghast when I tell them about when there was no Google and I had to catch a bus up the Euston Road to the British Library to do research!”
With Liz is a brilliant advert for her healthiness and goodness, I wonder if she ever falls off the wagon when stress levels rise and shuts herself in a cupboard with a pizza and a box of chocolates?
“Not exactly, but it is tempting!” she laughs. “But I have learnt over the years that it’s all about balance. The bottom line for me is to eat seasonally and locally as much as we can, with more plant materials… I’m a livestock farmer, I’m not anti-meat but I think we need to eat less meat of a better quality. Of course, you can get stuck into the chocolate but you have to have the right kind.”
At which point, she tells me about one of the biggest hits on her website: a recipe for raw chocolate truffles. She makes eating healthily sound easy and accessible, but reveals that not everyone at home is as keen.
“I love a nice juice, but my husband still calls it a liquid lawn. If I come up with something green, he’s very suspicious!”
With our time coming to an end, I wonder what wellness means for Liz.
“For me, it’s about putting a smile on someone’s face, whether that’s through greater energy levels, through food, through activity, self-esteem. At the beauty company, we never talked about anti-ageing and still don’t. Ageing is not a disease that we need to recover from or treat and hopefully, it’s going to happen to all of us.”
As I make my way home, I reflect that Liz Earle is ageing very well indeed and I resolve to download that recipe for raw chocolate truffles. To quote a famous line from an 80s movie, When Harry Met Sally: “I’ll have what’s she’s having.”
See Liz Earle's website for more information on her books, recipes and magazine...
