LENS
There is a quiet revolution underway, and it is being led by women who have, in the parlance of the age, ‘been there’. They have decades of experience, run homes, raised children, and had careers. They have, in short, lived, and it is precisely that lived experience that is now proving to be their most formidable competitive advantage.Not only are women 50+ the ultimate super consumers with 250 per cent more spending power than any other demographic on the planet, but these women have the clarity and the confidence to build something truly lasting. They are, as Forbes aptly termed them, encore entrepreneurs: women for whom the second act is, in every sense, now the main event.
Women 50+ Are the New Entrepreneurial Superpower
Women over 50 rewriting the rules of success
Lucy Goff, 59
"If I'm living proof of one thing," she has said, "it's that you're never too old, and it's never too late."
LUCY GOFF, LYMA
The woman who nearly died then built a £133M beauty empire.
There's a particular kind of woman who arrives at 50 and decides, quietly, that she is done apologising for taking up space. Lucy Goff is not that woman. Lucy Goff arrived at 50 and took over her own company. The story of LYMA begins, as the best ones do, not in a boardroom but in a hospital bed. In her late thirties, not long after the birth of her first child, Goff developed septicaemia. Six weeks in intensive care. A clinic in Geneva. And then, almost by accident, a longevity researcher named Professor Paul Clayton, whose pharmaceutical-grade supplement protocol changed the way she felt within weeks. Not in a vague, wellness-industry-buzzword way. Measurably, viscerally, undeniably different. She never forgot it. And when she finally built the thing she knew needed to exist, she called it LYMA — a luxury wellness brand built around clinically-dosed supplements and a groundbreaking handheld laser device. She took full control of the company at 50. Time named its laser one of the best inventions of the year. Forbes put her on the 50 Over 50. LYMA now carries a £133M valuation and grows at 40% year on year.
The LYMA Laser is a clinical-grade cold laser engineered to trigger a genetic switch inside each skin cell — which sounds like science fiction until you look at the before-and-afters, at which point it sounds more like the answer to every prayer you've ever quietly directed at your bathroom mirror. The device delivers, at home, what would otherwise require £30,000 worth of clinical treatments, with zero pain, zero damage, zero downtime, and approximately zero patience required for results. Time Magazine named it one of its best inventions of the year. The NHS is reportedly exploring its applications in cancer recovery and wound healing. Celebrity agents and PAs have, by Goff's own admission, been calling non-stop.
Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan. Bobbi Brown, at 68, has been drawn into conversation with Goff for the brand's Power Women series. Laura Bailey confides that LYMA is her "security blanket" — something she never misses and always travels with. Kelly Hoppen has discussed ageing and the laser with characteristic directness. These are not women who recommend things lightly.
For the uninitiated, the entry point is the LYMA Laser Starter Kit — and yes, it is an investment, in the way that a great cashmere coat or a course of Pilates is an investment: you feel the difference immediately and resent ever having gone without it. The kit includes the clinic-grade 500mW laser itself, a 30-day supply of the Oxygen Mist and Oxygen Glide, sponges, a travel pouch, USB charger, and the brand's signature copper authenticity card — which doubles as your entry into the LYMA Power Circle, an exclusive membership platform that unlocks expert content, specialist access, and the kind of insider knowledge that used to require either a very good dermatologist or a very indiscreet facialist.
The protocol is disarmingly simple: three minutes daily, results visible within 30 days, with the full transformation building over 12 weeks. Use it over makeup, over SPF, on the go. It was designed, you sense, by someone who has genuinely tried to make self-care fit around a real life. LYMA
The LYMA Laser Starter Kit, Supplement Starter Kit, and Skincare Starter Kit are available at Harvey Nichols and directly at LYMA www.lyma.life.com
"It would be failing if we, as a wellness brand, didn't look to sexual wellbeing as part of our holistic offering."
Alexandra Dunhill, 66
ALEXANDRA DUNHILL, LADY A
The Lady who knew the gap
Lady A (the CBD brand she launched at 59) began, as so many of the best ideas do, with a moment of clarity in someone else's living room. In 2017, visiting her son Piers in Los Angeles, Dunhill was struck by how different he seemed — calmer, more focused, better. He'd been taking CBD for his anxiety. She toured every CBD store she could find in LA. She was fascinated, and she was frustrated. Because everywhere she looked, the products were masculine, sports-focused, and bore no relationship whatsoever to the specific ways CBD could serve a woman's body. No one had thought to tailor them. Or if they had, they hadn't thought hard enough.
Alexandra Dunhill’s great-grandfather Alfred built his empire selling luxury products to gentlemen like tobacco, motoring accessories, and the finest leather goods a man of the early 20th Century aspired to. Alexandra Dunhill has done something considerably more interesting with the family DNA. She has taken that same appetite for quality, and that same instinct for an underserved customer, and pointed it squarely at the women the wellness industry had spent decades ignoring.
She spent the next two years in intensive research and development, working with scientists, cannabinoid researchers and CBD experts, before launching Lady A at the end of 2019. The brief was precise: to optimise the female health benefits of CBD, from hormone regulation to cramp relief. The packaging — white and gold bottles, marbled boxes, the kind of thing you'd feel entirely comfortable leaving on a bathroom shelf or giving as a gift — was designed by Dunhill herself, who had been a painter and interior designer long before she became an entrepreneur. "I wanted to bring my design sensibilities and a real sensory feel to Lady A," she has said, "to give it that luxe, intimate feel."
Lady A is FSA-validated — which matters more than most people realise. The CBD industry is plagued by brands that label products incorrectly and hide behind vague certifications, and the FSA's approval process has rejected the majority of applications it has received. Lady A passed. Its hemp is grown and harvested in Colorado and made in the UK, organic, cruelty-free, vegan, and pesticide-free. The science is rigorous. The aesthetic is impeccable. It is stocked at Selfridges and Fenwick, which tells you everything about where this brand sits in the market.
Start with the Tinctures, Lady A's most celebrated product and, by all accounts, the one that converts the sceptics. A blend of turmeric, CBD, rosehip oil and blood orange infusion, it provides a daily source of Vitamin D, decreases inflammation and supports immune function. Customers describe it as the thing that makes the CBD industry finally make sense: "It gently smooths out the edges of a hard day, like taking a huge exhale. Your shoulders drop, your mind quietens, and the noise of the day subsides." The Anytime Tincture is perfect for sleep too and add the Everyday Healing Balm for topical relief. The balm, infused with CBD, ginger and lemongrass essential oils rich in antioxidants, has become a cult product among customers dealing with everything from muscle tension to inflamed skin, with reviews that read more like conversion testimonials than product feedback.
The After Dusk intimacy line, a CBD massage oil with warming ginger, cinnamon and cardamom, an intimacy lubricant, and a silk eye mask, is the range that says the quiet part loud. Dunhill launched it with characteristic nerve: "Your sex life is all part of the circle of a well-balanced, well-lived life." At a moment when the conversation around women's midlife intimacy has finally become something the wellness industry is willing to have, Lady A was already there.
Alfred Dunhill, one suspects, would recognise the instinct entirely. The luxury goods, the meticulous design, the confidence that a particular customer deserved better than what existed. He just never imagined his great-granddaughter would be the one to do it, or that her customer would be so comprehensively underserved.
Lady A is available at ladya.health, Selfridges and Fenwick.
"You can reset each decade and decide: is this going to be my best decade? And this is my best."
Trinny Woodall, 62
TRINNY WOODALL, TRINNY LONDON
The Woman Who Sold Her House to Build an Empire
There is a particular kind of audacity that arrives not in spite of age but because of it. Woodall, known to a generation of British women as the sharp, funny, occasionally terrifying co-presenter of What Not to Wear, had spent two decades watching women at beauty counters feel confused, dismissed, and sent home with the wrong shade of foundation by someone half their age who had never dealt with anything more complex than a T-zone. She saw the gap. She knew exactly what needed to go in it. And when the industry failed to agree and over investor 250 rejections, she sold her designer wardrobe and her house, sat down at her kitchen table, and built it herself.
Trinny London launched in 2017 with a mission that sounds simple but was, at the time, quietly revolutionary: to make every woman feel better about herself, starting with the realisation that beauty at 35, 50, or 65 looks and behaves differently, and deserves products that know that. The investors who passed on it (all 250 of them) presumably understand, with the benefit of hindsight, what they missed.
What followed was not a standard beauty brand launch. Woodall pioneered a social-first approach to beauty retail, broadcasting her daily makeup routine live on Instagram at a time when that was considered an eccentric thing for a founder to do. It turned out to be the strategy. She didn't talk at women; she talked with them — about hormones, about skin changes, about the specific and underserved misery of being handed a concealer in a shade designed for someone thirty years younger. A community of over a million followed.
Woodall has spoken about ageism from investors with remarkable directness, revealing that she was being asked, at 51, whether she'd really be able to run the business in 10 years' time. She notes this without particular bitterness, more with the calm amusement of someone who has since built a £185M company and opened a flagship store in Chelsea, while the people asking those questions have presumably moved on to doubting someone else. Trinny London now has over 1.2 million customers and ships to 180 countries.
Before the covetable BFF, before The Elevator, before the stacking pots, there is the Be Your Best Enzyme Balm Cleanser, and it matters more than people give cleansers credit for. A nourishing, makeup-dissolving balm that removes everything without stripping the skin of a single drop of the moisture it has spent years learning to retain, it is the foundation of the whole Trinny London philosophy in one step: gentle, effective, designed for skin that has history. Use it and your serums will actually work. Skip it and you're wasting everything that comes after.
The Plump Up Peptide + HA Serum does the quiet, serious work that great skincare does invisibly. A peptide and hyaluronic acid serum built specifically to boost elasticity and restore volume to skin that has lost some of its structural confidence, it is the product that makes everything on top of it perform better: smoother application, more luminous finish, the kind of plumpness that used to require considerably more aggressive interventions. The BFF Skin Perfector SPF30 — the product that Woodall's community returns to, repeatedly and devotedly, above almost all others. Simultaneously a lightly tinted moisturiser, a skincare hybrid, and the single most sensible anti-ageing step any dermatologist will ever recommend, the formula is weightless, the coverage is the "my skin but better" kind, and for women over 50 whose skin has become drier and more reactive, it consistently converts the sceptical. The Elevator Neck and Décolleté Concentrate, which is, by some distance, the product that most deserves to be in your bathroom right now. It is Trinny London's bestseller, with one sold every thirty seconds. That statistic exists because the neck is, as every woman over 50 quietly knows, the area that gives the game away, and the area that almost every luxury skincare routine neglects to address with anything approaching proper intention. Supercharged peptides rebuild collagen. Encapsulated alpha arbutin addresses pigmentation. The texture is rich without being heavy. Reviewers in their early fifties describe visible changes in firmness and texture within weeks. At £69 for 50ml, it costs less than most facials and works considerably harder. An instant soft-focus filler that erases the appearance of lines, pores, and texture around the mouth and eyes, Miracle Blur Lip and Line Fillersells out repeatedly for the straightforward reason that it works, visibly, immediately, and without requiring any particular skill to apply. For the eyes, the Take Back Time Eye Cream is the product Woodall is most personally invested in. "We started to see changes in fine lines, and I'd never seen that before," she has said.
Trinny London is available at trinnylondon.com, John Lewis, Liberty London, and the Chelsea flagship.
The Elevator Neck and Décolleté Concentrate, £69
