Pure Beauty

Meet the e-tail site on a mission to champion the best of British beauty

By Julia Wray | Published: 23-Mar-2021

A Beautiful Life provides a curated selection of beauty and wellness goods from UK brands

A new online shopping destination has been set up to bring British beauty and wellness brands to a digital audience.

A Beautiful Life, which launched on 22 March, features both up-and-coming and established UK-headquartered brands across skin care, body, make-up and lifestyle, with labels including Jane Scrivner, Slow Ageing, Bee Good, Bharti Vyas, Guava & Gold, Daniel Sandler and Bloom & Blossom, among others.

The website is the brainchild of Lydia Roscoe, who has 25 years’ experience in the beauty industry working for companies including L’Oréal, Harrods, John Lewis, Coty and Unilever.

Commenting on the decision to highlight British brands specifically, Roscoe told Cosmetics Business: “All the magazines were doing features on the best British beauty brands. Then when I started talking to brands and insiders, they all said, ‘this is just such a missed area’. It's something that I think people really want to see.

“When people think of British products, there's that automatic reputation around the world that British products, including beauty, are just really good quality,” Roscoe added, sharing how impressed she was by the commitment to quality and sustainability shown by the brands A Beautiful Life works with.

The launch has been given the backing of local beauty industry leaders, including CEW (UK), whose Managing Director, Sallie Berkerey, commented: “The British Beauty industry has quickly taken advantage of advancements in digital technology and the consumer’s growing thirst for new products and as a result people have set up and continue to set up their own businesses within the sector.”

Roscoe also believes the move towards ‘supporting local’ will see British consumers begin to explore domestic brands more.

“People are queuing up at their local coffee shop rather than Starbucks – there is a real feeling of shopping closer to home and supporting local businesses, and although this is online, I don’t think that will be lost, no matter what happens over the next year.”

To make this exploration of growing British favourites simpler, A Beautiful Life’s other USP is to sell only hero products from its partner brands in a bid to make the selection process less daunting for consumers looking to discover new beauty goods.

“Beauty is such a daunting industry now. It’s confusing!” said Roscoe. “There are just too many products. You go on to a lot of these big beauty websites and you click on anti-ageing, for example, and there are hundreds and hundreds of products. How do you even start if you don't know these products? We just want to make it as easy as possible.”

She added that by curating brands’ bestsellers and hero products, consumers who might be nervous about spending luxury-level money on a brand they’d not tried before can have their confidence boosted knowing that all products on A Beautiful Life are those brands’ “most highly regarded [products] by consumers… there’s a sort of tried and tested element in that”.

“A Beautiful Life is new and different and offering something that’s currently missing," said Roscoe. "Hopefully we can fill that gap.”

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