The Carousel caught up with beauty maven Trinny Woodall during her recent trip to Sydney. Here, she shares her best kept beauty secrets and how to look after your skin in the hotter months of summer.

Tell us your best tips to look after your skin as you spring into summer.

If you haven’t begun wearing SPF, it’s the first thing you’ve got to think about. SPF is something that’s always important, whether it’s a cloudy day or a sunny day. It is the most important aspect of any skincare routine, and it’s the best preventative measure that you will have for having good skin throughout your life. I think you go naturally to a lighter base because you are not thinking of, you know, overcast days, you feel there’s bright direct sunlight on your face. Unless you have specific things you want to cover up, I would go to tinted moisturizers or tinted products like our Trinny London BFFs. 

I think we also change the colour palette depending on the season – even though we might suit a combination of colours, I know I definitely have colours I wear more in winter, like dark greens, deep greens and reds and burgundies – and in the summer I go towards those lighter shades. I think your makeup can change accordingly for the season. I much prefer wearing a bright red lip in summer than in winter because I feel that sometimes I wear white and it can wash me out, but if I wear a red lip, it just gives that beautiful flash of colour and keep everything else clean. I think it’s a really timeless makeup look. 

We might still do a smokey eye, but I think it’s about having that lovely element of light in the inner corners of your eye – like our TrinnyLondon Eye2Eyes in Virtue, Sun and Dawn – we have shades that work for all different skin tones whether you’re cool or warm-toned.

If you’re feeling you’re struggling to get from spring to summer, your makeup can do it for you.

Twiggy once told me she has never gone to bed without removing her makeup. What are your golden rules when it comes to skincare? And have you ever gone to bed without taking off your makeup?

Since the age of 16, I’ve never gone to bed without taking off my makeup. Unlike Twiggy who had amazing skin in her teens, I had terrible skin in my teens – so I knew I couldn’t get that bacteria to go into overdrive. 

I think also that skin massaging of the face is really important because we need to keep the circulation of our skin at a really healthy place. There are lots of tools out there which cost money, so you can use your fingers and do a massage and stimulate your skin. 

I love also facial ‘A E I O U’’s – I’ve done them for years. My grandmother taught me originally and I’ve adapted them – it’s like a workout for your face as if you were doing weightlifting, but you are just doing that as a certain type of body conditioning you can do where you use your own body weight and in the way when you do ‘A E I O U’, you are using your own facial expression to contour and lift your face. When I remember to do it every day, I really notice the difference in the toning and structure of my face.

I love your BFF skin perfector – what do you love about it?

I love it because I want a little something when I leave the house – I originally developed it because I just knew how many women, especially in England (but actually in every part of the world), don’t religiously put SPF on their face every day. 

I wanted to make a product where you could put it on for the other benefit. To me, the other benefit is: it wakes up in your skin, it gives you the tiniest bit of coverage, you get a little gentle glow, but it’s not a sweat. Many women use it because they love that look and it’s like we’re secretly feeding them SPF 30. I love that about the product – it’s like taking a sweet as opposed to taking a vitamin (like a gummy bear with vitamin benefits).  It’s got an aesthetic – a really fabulous feel at the end, which not every SPF has in it what it would do to your skin and how you look at your skin afterwards. 

What do mature women need to think about more when they are looking after their skin?

I think they need to think about the fact that they’re losing collagen. By the time you hit menopause, you lose 2% a year as opposed to 1% a year. You need to be looking at ingredients that not only accelerate the resurfacing of your skin like acids, or accelerate the turnover of your skin like retinoids, but you need to look at ingredients that feed your skin. For me, I think peptides feed the skin. They feed the amino acids that are the proteins that make both elastane and collagen and are some of the most valuable ingredients in skincare today – and something that we didn’t really have actively in skincare a few years ago.

Tell us about your favourite beauty tricks. 

If I go on a plane, I always put a little wet mask on first, I might put Sisley’s Sleeping Mask, which I just discovered actually (I used to use their Black Rose mask).

Or I use Plump Up and two layers of Bounce Back from Trinny London – and then I put a dry sheet mask on top, and then I’ll be on the plane like that for 10 hours – I’ll parade up and down the aisle, I’ll go to the loo like that. I look like Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street. I don’t really care because planes are super, super bad for skin as they sap all the hydrations in your skin and there is no moisture in the air, so your skin will just dry out like a prune. So that’s where I most want to protect my skin. I travel quite a lot and I did that coming to Australia and it really helped me land at the airport and have soft, dewy skin. 

I also think drinking water – I know that when I look at myself at night, and I think I look rather tired, the first thing I will have to check is how much water have you drunk today? Because that is the thing that will most plump up your skin. If you do it in conjunction with a Hyaluronic Acid, you are giving the food for the Hyaluronic Acid to work with. If you have more moisture in your skin, it will work even better. 

What’s new for Trinny London?

We’ve just launched gifting and we have begun a journey of having starter kits for skincare. It’s’ a brilliant way of women having a journey that takes a few weeks and is stackable. I don’t think there’s ever been stackable skincare. I’m really excited by where that’s heading and as a journey that’s going to expand. So you better start stacking your skincare now. That to me is the most exciting thing that we’re working on. 

Long term, there are obvious areas that we can go into with skincare and we have 15 things we’re working on – but we need always to have a unique proposition. When we think of innovation, Trinny London is not something that anyone else is doing. We have to think of what is the right packaging for it, what are the right ingredients to put in it? We have to do compatibility testing and consumer trials and all these take time and we never like to cut corners. That’s why I never say what’s coming next because you have a kind of juggling act of these things you’re working on and something suddenly, you know, are going quicker and then you’re going to launch those earlier. So I can’t tell you anything about what will be next, apart from our starter sets, which we’ve just launched in gifting. 

As an entrepreneur, what is your greatest achievement?

Building a brand that truly resonates with a woman who felt she was under-served in the market.

Check out TrinnyLondon here.