Jo Malone

Joanne Malone was born in 1963 in Bexleyheath, Kent, into a household with little money. Her mother worked for a society beautician and later ran a small beauty business of her own; her father was a magician and gambler who could lose the week's earnings. She is dyslexic, struggled at school, and left at fifteen when her mother had a stroke, taking over the client list to keep the family afloat.

She gave facials in a spare room, and began making a nutmeg and ginger bath oil on the kitchen stove as a present for clients. They came back asking for more, and one ordered a hundred bottles for a party. She and her husband Gary, a surveyor she had met at church, ran the business from their flat, and in 1994 opened a shop in Walton Street, Chelsea. Her idea was to sell fragrance as something simple, layered and worn to please oneself rather than to impress. The bottles were plain, with black-edged labels she designed herself.

In 1999 Estée Lauder bought the company, keeping her as creative director. In 2003 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and told her chances were poor; she had a year of chemotherapy in New York and a mastectomy. In 2006 she left the company, unable, she said, to walk back into a business that no longer felt hers, and was bound by an agreement not to compete for five years.

She has described those years as the worst of her life, and the loss of her name as a kind of bereavement. In 2011 she launched Jo Loves, starting over with a stall in a shop. She was appointed CBE in 2018.