Bobbi Brown: ‘I don’t do injectables – I don’t think they look right’
It’s 9.30am and Bobbi Brown, who has just returned from a two-month-long work trip, has already put her jet-lagged body through a gym workout. “My business coach told me this morning I need time to recover, but I forgot – so I’m recovering during this interview,” she says. We are meeting via video from her home in New Jersey and the make-up mogul is ironically make-up free. Or is she? It’s hard to tell considering Brown made her name – and fortune – as the godmother of no make-up make-up.
Originally a make-up artist, Bobbi Brown rose to fame in the early 1990s when her humble line of 10 neutral-toned lipsticks began outselling established beauty houses almost as soon as they were launched. It went on to become one of the biggest beauty brands in the world, thanks to Brown’s nous for what women really wanted in their make-up bags. “Pretty not trendy” was one of the label’s first straplines.
Brown sold her eponymous brand to Estée Lauder Companies in 1995 for a reported $74.5 million, five years after it launched in Bergdorf Goodman, a moment that’s captured in an image of a 32-year old Brown in front of the world-renowned department store, holding her first son, Dylan (she has three sons with her husband and business partner, Steven Plofker), wearing a green Armani blazer her father had bought her for her 30th birthday – the first designer item she’d ever owned.
Today Brown can buy all the blazers she wants and natural-looking make-up is ubiquitous. But in 1991, when it was still bold and highly pigmented it was a risky move, one of many Brown has made throughout her life, including a nutritional supplement line called Evolution 18 that “didn’t fly” and a boutique hotel, The George, in her hometown of Montclair, that did.
She walked away from her former company in 2016, having led the creative direction for two decades. She had four and a half years left on an excruciatingly long 25-year non-compete agreement. Was it hard to walk away from her name? “It felt terrible,” she concedes. “It wasn’t just my name, it was my first baby. I had to ask myself, who am I now? What can I do now?”
Put her feet up? Take up pottery? “People always ask me why I’m not living on some tropical island somewhere. But I love to work. Work is my hobby,” explains the serial entrepreneur who used the enforced hiatus to experiment with other ventures, while counting down the days until she could re-enter the beauty sector, aged 62 with her new brand, Jones Road.
“I bought a charm with an ampersand sign that I wore around my neck. I had ‘10.20’ engraved on the back of it; the date my non-compete agreement ended,” says Brown. “We launched Jones Road two days later.” It’s hard to imagine a more high-stakes move than to bring a make-up range into the world in the midst of a global pandemic.
But Brown was characteristically indefatigable. “Everyone around me said, ‘don’t do it; no one cares about beauty right now’ but I launched it anyway,” she says beaming. “It was the best feeling; I was like a kid in a candy shop,” says Brown, who owns the company outright with her husband, taking no outside investment. I get the sense she doesn’t want to be beholden to the boardroom ever again, having said “make-up shouldn’t be decided on by committee”.
Was it tough being a woman in a male-dominated beauty industry? “Can you imagine being in those rooms with these men wagging their fingers at me like I was a little kid?” But Brown learnt how to get things done her way. “I would study the men in those meetings. While my female colleagues would be on the edge of their seats, the men around the table would wait for the right moment to make their point. I studied that, and learnt to hear them out. And then I’d do whatever I wanted anyway,” she says with a smile.
Her second act as a female founder
Two and a half years later, and Jones Road (a street name she drove past in the Hamptons) has managed something few brands have: to capture a wide net of beauty consumers from cosmetic-fluent Gen-Zers through to cash-rich Boomers, due in part to her success on social media – sales quadrupled when she joined TikTok in 2021.
Though she clearly hadn’t planned on it getting so big so fast (the brand had over $20 million in sales its first year and is expected to double its revenues in 2023). In 2021, she told the Financial Times that she never wanted to be part of a billion dollar company again. “But hey, it’s heading that way,” she says, shrugging her shoulders, as if to say ‘who knew?’ “I had planned to launch on Etsy with one eye pencil,” explains Brown of the clean, high-performance beauty range that’s formulated to work on every skin type and tone.
A better body after 60
Her enthusiasm may not have wavered, but I wonder whether her body is telling her otherwise. Has health and fitness become part of Brown’s business strategy now she’s in her second act? “I’ve always exercised but the way I exercise has changed. In my 20s, it was high-impact cardio, now I’m walking – I try to get in my 10,000 steps a day.” But it’s resistance training that’s made the most difference. “I do weight training twice a week, which has really helped to change my body composition – and it makes me feel good. I need to be able to pick up my granddaughter who’s almost fourteen pounds.” I can already feel the shame seep in as I ponder the dust gathering on my gym membership, when she announces: “This year I started hip-hop dancing. I’m not very good, but I don’t care because I love to dance.”
Eating to age well
“I think, most of the time, I look pretty good for my age,” she tells me (she does). “But I think it has a lot more to do with food than anything I’m doing to my skin.” Brown, a qualified nutrition coach and author of a health and wellness book, Beauty from the Inside Out, tells me she’s a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow’s dietary advisor, Dr Will Cole, the author of Intuitive Fasting and Gut Feelings.
Though she isn’t strict. “I’m all about moderation and intuitive eating, but will I eat pizza? Not usually, because it won’t make me feel good –but if it’s good pizza I will pay that price and, sometimes I just want someone’s French fries,” she says. White flour and sugar, however, are Brown’s non-negotiables. “I can’t eat cookies, so I don’t,” she explains of the decision to cut out foods that disrupt her gut health.
On cosmetic surgery
Brown has great skin. Has she benefited from surgical intervention? “I don’t do injectables, I don’t think they look right. Some of my friends get a little Botox and sometimes it looks good. Other times they’ve got this frozen forehead that doesn’t match everything else [on their face].” And yet she empathises with the pressure to tweak. “I’m not going to tell women they should age gracefully, it’s just what I choose to do,” says Brown.
“But, listen, I’m the first to go to my dermatologist and ask: what else can I do apart from injectables?” What she’s done is the firming energy treatment Ultherapy, which was “expensive and really painful – but I do think it made me look better”. And Morpheus8, the skin tightening radiofrequency treatment Judy Murray famously had. “I don’t know if I’ll do it again, but it did help,” Brown says, asking me if I’ve had EmSculpt, the muscle firming energy treatment that’s the equivalent of a squillion sit ups, which is on her list to try.
What’s next for Bobbi Brown?
She’s bringing out a Jones Road Gel Bronzer this month that’s so light (and un-orange) it can be applied all over as a complexion booster, or on the high points of the face.
And a line of Tinted Face Powders. “Wait until you try them, it’s crazy how good they are,” she promises. Brown is most excited about opening Jones Road stores – the flagship shop in Montclair turned over $1 million in sales within the first six months, and more are to come. Pressing for a product scoop, Brown says to expect a fragrance in September. What does Jones Road smell like? She won’t say, but I have no doubt it will be the perfume we never knew we needed.