“There couldn’t be a better fucking example of what I’m talking about than this,” says an amused and exasperated Sarah Creal as we battle to hear each other in the lounge of a central London hotel. The 56-year-old beauty entrepreneur is trying to tell me about all the male investors who “didn’t get why women over 40 needed more representation”, but is barely able to make herself heard over a group of loud baseball-capped young men at a nearby table.
Creal, as tall, glamorous and self-assured an adoptive New Yorker as you’ll find, is not the sort of woman to be drowned out by the sound of louder men. She has enjoyed a three-decade career as a product formulator and developer for other people. Much of it was spent at Estée Lauder, where she masterminded product development for the high-profile beauty collaborations of both Tom Ford and Victoria Beckham, which spawned their blockbusting standalone brands. In 2024 she launched her own: a collection of make-up, skincare and brushes. Created to suit 40-plus women, Sarah Creal Beauty will finally be distributed in the UK next month from its website and from Space NK.
She also had to counter arguments that other brands were already speaking to the demographic she was targeting. “You’re telling me that women of 40-plus only deserve two brands when Gen Z gets 20,000? That’s kind of the problem right there,” Creal says. She may appear NYC ice-queen but her personality is anything but. She’s sharp, funny and relentlessly upbeat. A girl’s girl, she tells anecdotes that centre around conversations with her friends, sisters, life with teenage daughters (her ex-husband lives in the same building; their daughters ride the lift between him on the 16th floor and her on the 29th).
