Think you know what the future of beauty innovation looks like? Think again. We spoke to the CEO of the British Beauty Council to discover the surprising directions she thinks it’s heading.
Few people are better placed to predict the next wave of British beauty innovation than Millie Kendall, CEO and co-founder of the British Beauty Council. Ahead of British Beauty Week (20-26 October 2025), CF’s beauty director Becki Murray sat down with Kendall to explore how Britain’s £30.4 billion beauty industry – which grew nine per cent in 2024 alone – is shaping a future defined by creativity, technology, and responsibility.
As Kendall puts it, the beauty world is “at a precipice” – one where innovation, sustainability, and collaboration are transforming not only how we look, but how we live.
Here’s how her beauty inspirations and ‘bull-in-a-china-shop’ attitude helped her break the beauty mould and how she predicts the industry will continue to evolve in 2026 and beyond.
Going back to her roots
It was two contrasting beauty influences – her father’s work ethic and her grandmother’s transformative glamour – that first drove Kendall to work within the beauty industry. Her more romantic vision of beauty came from her grandmother, whose rituals were pure theatre:
“My grandmother would sit at a dressing table with a towel around her shoulders, applying her Nivea cream (and letting her very fat Corgi lick her fingers),” Kendall reveals. “She was incredibly glamorous – like Zsa Zsa Gabor – and I used to just sit there, enamoured by the whole process. It was only as I got older that I realised that my grandmother wasn’t the movie star that I thought she was – she came from a peasant village in Ukraine – but that made me understand the power of getting ready every day even more.”
Kendall’s father worked in the beauty industry itself, as a hairdresser, but through his career, she was exposed to the businesses’ harsher side as well. “I grew up sitting on the floor covered in hair [at her dad’s salon], so I know what it is like to run a small business, but also to feel like you’re on your own and to not feel celebrated by your community,” she reveals. “I think that was a big trigger for me; it propelled me to do what I do today, which is helping provide better support for those in the beauty industry.”
On breaking the beauty mould
Kendall’s job title has shifted multiple times over the years, but innovation is always at her heart: “I’m a bit of a bull in a china shop,” she says. “Maybe I’ve got a good eye, but what really drives me is that maverick, renegade energy of ‘can I do something different that no one else has done before?'”
Take, for example, Ruby & Millie – a makeup brand she created alongside makeup artist Ruby Hammer, which launched into Boots in 1998. It was widely ahead of its time, not only through its product offering, but also because of its distribution strategy.
“While it may seem common these days to launch in a premium department store and then go into Boots or Superdrug, we invented that model; before you either had to be premium or mass,” reveals Kendall. She applied that same disruptive energy to BeautyMART in 2012, the first really curated beauty retailer that championed individual hero products, over full ranges. “That’s also a model that’s still being used today,” she notes.
On what drives the beauty industry today
In 2018, Kendall cofounded the British Beauty Council – an organisation aiming to shape the future of the British beauty industry through policy, careers, investment and innovation. Since then, she’s seen the landscape shift dramatically.
“The funny thing about the beauty industry today is that it doesn’t embrace the middle ground – you’ve always got extremes, which is actually a good reflection of geopolitics,” Kendall reveals. “For example, on one side you’ve got extreme overconsumption and social media noise, and on the other, there are environmental campaigners and activists – both of which can create amazing new formulations and packaging ideas.”
Social media, she adds, fuels this polarisation: “People use beauty as a way to be identified by how we look, but to stand out in an ever-growing sea of faces online, we tend to take a stance of extremes. You can’t easily be in that grey space anymore, which is unfortunate, because that’s actually a nice place to be.”
On the power of British beauty…
If there’s one thing Kendall wants the world to know, it’s that British beauty has never been stronger. With its distinctive mix of creativity, craftsmanship, and cultural relevance, she believes the UK is no longer following global trends – it’s setting them.
“I think we’ve got some of the most amazing creative talent in the world,” Kendall says proudly, and that creative excellence, she explains, is deeply rooted in heritage; people like the experimental hairstylist Vidal Sassoon and Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop, as well as brands like Yardley, Neal’s Yard, and John Frieda.
Now, that legacy is translating into global dominance. “For the first time in our history, we’re selling more premium beauty products in the UK than France, Germany, Italy and Spain (the other four of the top five markets in Europe),” Kendall reveals. “It’s pretty astonishing – no one thought you could ever topple France off the top, and we’ve done it. British craftsmanship is extraordinary; we just don’t talk about it enough.”
… and the importance of British Beauty Week
That desire to champion homegrown excellence is at the heart of British Beauty Week, the British Beauty Council’s flagship event that celebrates the industry’s economic, social, and cultural power. This year, the event is bigger than ever, with hundreds of panel talks and brand pop-ups across the country, including in London, Yorkshire, Cardiff and Liverpool. You can find the full schedule of events here.
“The idea is to really shine a light on our industry,” Kendall explains. “People suddenly realised how much they missed their hairdresser or their nail tech during Covid (which was a game-changer), but I’m not sure they always remember that now. Yet, have you ever thought about the fact that your hairdresser is helping hold up the high street? If all the salons in your neighbourhood disappeared tomorrow, you’d feel it. Beauty Week is a chance to reinvigorate that message.”
What’s next: Beauty’s big moves
British Beauty Week is also a celebration of how the beauty industry is constantly evolving. Here are the big trends that Kendall predicts we’ll be seeing in 2026 and beyond.
1. The growth of at-home beauty
“I’m loving the beauty tech space at the moment,” Kendall says, citing brands like Shark and CurrentBody who are pushing innovations in hair tools and LED face masks. “I do think it needs regulation as I’m not sure that everything that is sold on Amazon actually works, but the sector is having a real influence on the choices we have for at-home beauty treatments, and there’s still so much of the space that feels untapped.”
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2. The booming influence of aesthetics
Once whispered about, tweakments are now much more accepted – and evolving fast, says Kendall. “I went to a big aesthetic show in France last year, and I saw some amazing things that go beyond Botox and fillers. That includes a technology that shocks the muscle 1.5 millimetres under the skin for a speedy ‘face lift’ effect. We are past the days of old stomach massages that didn’t really do anything.”
3. True sustainability
If there’s one area that the British Beauty Council is really driving forward, it’s sustainability. “We started with the idea to drop a bit of a grenade into the industry and invited an external agency to do some deep dive analysis into what we were doing right and wrong,” reveals Kendall.
That led to the creation of the Sustainable Beauty Coalition – which is now helping to reduce businesses’ reliance on plastic – and the Great British Beauty Clean Up, every March; a fantastic scheme where retailers and brands get involved in a nationwide recycling programme. There’s help for small businesses too, with the launch of an affordable recycling bin scheme, in partnership with innovative recycling company MYGroup.
Need some inspiration for brands doing it well already? “Shellworks is an amazing patron of the British Beauty Council and they have a brilliant innovation for packaging – a polymer from marine waste that looks like plastic, acts like plastic, but isn’t plastic,” Kendal explains. The fragrance brand Ffern is another highlight; not just for its seasonal fragrances but because the beautiful packaging is made from mushrooms, another example of “a lot of innovation coming out of the sustainability space.”
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4. A refocus on a safety-first approach
It’s not all about newness though – there are innovative moves to make beauty even safer, too. “When we were part of the EU, we were part of EU Reach laws on chemical safety. Now we have UK Reach and we’ve copied similar standards, but things are slipping through the net,” explains Kendall. “For example, there’s currently no regulation on hair extensions, so we have a minefield of human rights issues (for natural ones) and safety issues around the release of toxins when materials are heated up (for synthetic ones). We need to start looking into this area.”
Another thing that’s top of the action list: the UV Safety Initiative. “I personally believe that SPF should be considered an essential item, which would mean it shouldn’t be subject to VAT, to get SPF into more people’s hands,” says Kendall. The British Beauty Council has already helped launch a parliamentary inquiry this year on the matter – a big move that’s likely to generate lots of discussion – and hopefully giant steps forward.
5. The push for regulation for kids using social media
Social media is another area ripe for regulation, Kendall believes, not least because while it’s an incredibly strong source of beauty inspiration, it also fuels undeniable insecurities. “I do think there has to be some regulation of young people and phones,” she explains. “I was listening to the whistleblower from Meta who revealed that there is an Instagram algorithm that means if a young person puts up a picture and takes it down within 13 seconds, they are then marketed beauty products, because it’s taken to mean that they’re insecure enough to delete that image. That, to me, is horrifying and needs to change.”
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6. Makeup needs a little push
Perhaps surprisingly, one area where innovation is potentially not thriving is makeup, Kendall reveals: “I hate to say it, but I think makeup needs to evolve a bit more. A lot of it is just trawling the history books of what we did before. For example, right now, everyone is talking about tubing mascara, but DHC had one back in the 80s.”
A jump forward could perhaps come from one of the brand’s supported by the British Beauty Council’s investment fund in collaboration with New York-based venture capital firm Venrex. It’s helped support current industry icons Charlotte Tilbury and Lisa Eldridge after all. But, Kendall actually predicts it might also come from a surprising source: “I think aesthetics will help shape makeup and skincare as time goes on,” she reveals. “As treatments get more sophisticated, we are seeing a real change in young people’s skin, and, over time, I think that will change how we purchase and innovate other products.”
7. The power of collaboration
You might think that in beauty’s competitive market, there’s only dog-eat-dog competition, but the best innovations, says Kendall, actually now come from collaboration. “I guess the ideal scenario is a sort of two-way mentoring, where large brands are learning from more nimble single-person operators, and those smaller brands are benefiting from the economies of scale that those larger companies can offer,” Kendall explains.
“Last year, we managed to get the Competition & Markets Authority to change the rules around business collaborating for sustainability projects because, before that, they couldn’t joint purchase as it would be seen as price fixing,” she continues. “I’ve always said that a company can jump up and down and say, ‘we’re going to meet our sustainability goals by 2050 or whenever’, but we have to work together to bring those goals forward – otherwise it will be too late and no one will be worried about buying a deodorant anyway. Climate change is happening to everyone and it’s astonishing to see the penny drop in a room when you say that what works best is collaboration.”
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8. What AI means for beauty
“We can’t talk about innovation without addressing the whole AI piece either,” affirms Kendall too, “but I don’t even think we’ve quite tapped the edge of it. I think we’re at a really interesting kind of precipice. We’ve got all of these great things bubbling under the surface, but we haven’t quite seen what the impact of it is yet.”
9. The redefining of British beauty
Finally, search for an image of British beauty online and what do you currently see? Probably something Kendall wants to change, she admits: “What seems to come up is still a caricature of a woman with a bad tan, ‘slug brows’ and bad hair extensions, but I want the image to become one that reflects confidence.
As an industry, we’ve been seen to prey on people’s insecurities, but I don’t think we sit behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz and go, ‘oh, how do I make people feel really bad so they can buy more stuff?’ If you work in the industry, you know that it’s actually about empowerment. The right beauty can give you the confidence to walk out the door every day and do whatever it is that you do. That really negative perception on the outside is what I’ve spent seven years trying to change. I want bankers, business leaders, government officials, men in general, to look at us in a way that isn’t just someone wearing lots of makeup. That’s not what women aspire to.”
Ultimately, that’s not to say there aren’t challenges that still need to be solved within the beauty industry – Kendall lists diversity and inclusivity alongside sustainability and reputation, once again. But the basic goal of the British Beauty Council is to continually edge towards fixing those problems. “As an industry, we have to put our heads above the parapet and take the knocks to fix the wrongs,” Kendall concludes.
And, in our mind, that’s the best way to ensure the future of beauty innovation in Britain will continue to look very bright indeed…
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