Life Lessons with Trinny Woodall

Here we sit down with the woman behind the makeup brand that has us all running out to buy it, Trinny Woodall, to learn some life lessons.

Childhood and Teens

When I was six-and-a-half-years old, I left home for boarding school, and from then on, I didn’t really have that close relationship with my parents anymore because I spent about six months apart from them every year. I started my pre-teens aged 11, going to a different school, where my sister was four years older than me, and very popular, glamorous and fabulous. I was, or I felt at least, very gangly, spotty and really out of sorts; I then stayed back a year because I was very stupid! Life changed when I turned 15 and we went on a summer holiday to South Africa, where I met somebody whom I had a crush on. I came home, he sent postcards and it was quite cool that I had this person who liked me. By this point, my sister had left school so I suddenly felt I could be myself; it was like I had found my identity. I then went to day school in London aged 16. I started going crazy and doing a tonne of drugs, and had several years of trying to have a job, trying to think what my career should be. I lived life to the full then, but inwardly I was a mess. I matured early, and yet late!

20s

I went to rehab for a year, aged 26, and my life began. It changed me. I remember walking down the street one day after and I no longer had all those lovely layers of the onion that protected me – I had a panic attack. At the time, rehab wasn’t a nurturing place; it was a you’re-a-bad-person, we’ll-make-you-good type of place, so you felt very fragile. For that first year, I couldn’t see any of my friends because I didn’t want to start using drugs again. I took baby steps; I didn’t try to run before I could walk. I went to a NA meeting every day and just slowly built up my life, a life which before had been built on quicksand, but now I was building it on bricks. But slowly, this time of rebuilding and growth allowed me to ask myself, ‘What do I like doing?’, even though life had been a bit of a mess so far. And what I did love doing was making over my girlfriends – and so I made that my work! When I was 29, I met Johnny [Elichaoff].

30s

In my 30s, I was beginning to be a career woman. I did a couple of little jobs to get my confidence back and then, aged 32, I met Susannah [Constantine]. At the time, I was doing over some of my girlfriends, taking them shopping, loving the whole idea of transformation. I thought I’d love to write a column, and at the time, there was nothing in the press like what I had in mind; you either had M&S or you had high fashion and Vogue. There was this real huge gap in the market, and that’s where Susannah and I fitted in. We began writing this column What Not To Wear for The Daily Telegraph, and from that column came other things. There were tv series, and books, it lasted years, we went around the world with it, until we stopped being the flavour of the month in England, nobody loved us anymore. But we still had mortgages, we were still the main breadwinners, so we took our show to 16 countries and we made it in those countries, in Israel, India and Poland, in Scandinavia, in Australia. And that taught me so much about women, everything I thought only applied to British women, I realised applied to women all around the world. I also got married at 34. Johnny and I had been living together in my flat for a few years and felt we should get married, we just thought it was something we should do. He asked me the first time, but he wasn’t ready, and we split up. The second time he asked me, I was sitting on the loo and he passed a ring around the door! I had my daughter Lyla when I was 39.

40s

In my 40s, I was navigating being a career woman and a mum. I was the main breadwinner, we had bought a house, we had a big mortgage, I didn’t feel like I could take maternity leave, so I worked right up to the end and went back quickly after. I remember doing Michael Parkinson two weeks before I had Lyla and Graham Norton two weeks after. When Lyla was two-and-a-half-months old, I went to make a tv show in America. We had this amazing maternity nurse called Jenny, and every two years I had a reason to ask Jenny to stay, be it work, be it that Johnny and I had split up, there was always a reason. Jenny is still in our lives today; she is Lyla’s other parent, also because I am sort of dad/mum. Lyla will say, ‘What was my favourite food when I was six?’ And I’ll go, ‘I have no clue, ask Jenny!’ I’ll say, ‘I know what your favourite colour in clothing is, but Jenny knows certain things, like food, etc’. I always remember walking down the street with Lyla, and I was dressed head to toe in yellow, with a yellow feathered coat, and Lyla said to me, ‘I’m embarrassed to walk down the street with you’, and I said, ‘Well, find another mother then!’

50s

I was 51 when Johnny died, so my 50s were navigating grief, being a single parent and building a business as an entrepreneur. The Trinny London idea started when I was 51; we launched it three years later, so it’s eight years old today. My 50s was my most exciting decade work-wise because I did a lot, grew a lot, learnt a lot. I’d had a business before with Susannah, and that didn’t work out, so I had a template this time of what I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t hire people who were really qualified; I would hire people who were young and passionate. I was also adamant that I had to believe in myself and trust my instinct; I couldn’t let anybody convince me otherwise. The first time I went onto Instagram was in 2013, now I’ve a couple of million followers on all the different platforms. Today, we employ 340 people with 41 locations around the world.

60s

I’d like to say enjoying my 60s is what I’ve been doing, but actually it’s the challenge of growing a business, going from 5 people to 340, being a CEO, and how do you do that, having a daughter who is now living in another country and dealing with that sense of, I’m on my own. But if I look back, I do think that each one of the decades made the following decade a better one. My 20s couldn’t have got worse, in my 30s it was such a relief to be clean and to fall in love and to just realise I could have a career. In my 40s and 50s, it was about having to find work because we no longer worked in the UK. Turning 60 has also been about knowing what I don’t want, and what I don’t want is a full-time relationship where I live with somebody. But I do think I want somebody, not full￾time, because my life is quite full, but at the weekends, maybe. I want to have an adventurous life, even if I’m 80. I exercise five times a week, so I’m not incapacitated when I’m in my 80s – that is really important to me. And to keep learning. I want to keep learning. Life is exciting, and I want to keep it so.