The Beauty Digest: Dyson Does Teeth, Fenty Rips Up the Rulebook (Again) and a Surprisingly Fragrant Week for Dogs
Plus, proof that beauty doesn’t need to chase youth—and a new fragrance I’m borderline addicted to.
The Beauty Digest is my Beauty Director’s edit of what’s actually worth your attention. Each week, I’ll be sharing the new launches I’m using and loving, the viral treatments I’m putting to the test (and what I really think of the results), plus my take on the industry conversations everyone’s talking about.
The New Launches on My Radar
I often joke that my two great loves are beauty and dogs (I have two of my own). You can, then, imagine my delight when Jo Malone London announced it was launching a dog shampoo.
Created in collaboration with British pet-care brand WildWash, the Orange & Cedarwood Dog Shampoo is formulated with naturally derived essential oils of—yep, you guessed it—orange and cedarwood, and promises to gently cleanse and freshen the coat while leaving it beautifully shiny. There are four different bottles featuring illustrations of different dog breeds, the campaign stars Tom Hardy's French bulldog, Blue, and at £18 for 285ml, it is also, somewhat remarkably, cheaper than quite a few of the shampoos currently sitting in my own shower.
My only question now is: is it suitable for humans?
When it comes to fragrance, I can't resist a woody accord. Cedarwood, sandalwood, vetiver—something about those cocooning, dry notes does something to my brain. So Acqua di Parma's new Cedro Virtuoso was always going to have an unfair advantage.
Part of the Signatures of the Sun collection, it's essentially an ode to cedarwood, with three different varieties running through the fragrance. But it's the opening notes that makes it really interesting—Virginia cedarwood is co-infused with hazelnut, giving it a buttery quality, while Calabrian bergamot brightens things up, keeping it from becoming too rich. Then, Atlas and Alaska cedar bring spicier, slightly leathery facets before sandalwood, tonka bean and Ambrox make everything warm and enveloping as it dries down.
The result is woody, but not in a predictably masculine way. It's creamy, nutty and incredibly moreish. Consider the dopamine receptors well and truly activated.
When Fenty retired the original Pro Filt’r earlier this year, I was intrigued. But this week, we met its successor: Pro Filt’r Fluid Flex Natural Matte Longwear Foundation. Three years in development, it comes in 50 entirely new shades and promises flexible, medium-to-full coverage that moves with the skin, as well as 12-hour wear and resistance to sweat, humidity and transfer.
I'm pretty picky when it comes to foundation and rarely stray from a few select favourites. But this one has, without exaggeration, blown me away. The coverage is substantial, yet somehow looks fresh and natural rather than heavy. It sets and stays, but never seems to harden onto the face; instead, it moves with my skin, stays supple and, hours later, still looks remarkably fresh.
Spotlight On: Sarah Creal Beauty
I've been following Sarah Creal for several years now. As a beauty insider, she's one of those names that instantly commands respect and admiration. After all, she was behind some of the most iconic beauty brands of our time—Tom Ford Beauty, Victoria Beckham Beauty, Bobbi Brown and the original Prada Beauty among them. In other words, even if you didn't know her name, chances are you've known her work.
Her most recent venture bears her own name, and this week Sarah Creal Beauty finally landed in the UK, exclusively at Space NK. But unlike so many new brands on the block, this one has a serious USP: it isn't gagging for the attention of Gen Z. In fact, it isn't really giving them a second thought. Sarah Creal Beauty has been intelligently and painstakingly designed for, in the brand's own words, “babes 40+”.
And that doesn't just mean putting a 50-year-old woman in the campaign imagery. Before launching, Creal spoke to 2,000 women over 40 about what was no longer working for them—and then formulated accordingly. Concealer suddenly settling into fine lines? Face Flex is designed to flex with the skin without creasing or fading. Mascara transferring as eyelids become more hooded and richer eye creams enter the equation? Back of the Cab is a tubing formula designed to stay put, then break down easily with warm water. Losing some of the natural definition and colour around the lip line? pHLip reacts with your skin's pH to create a personalised wash of colour while adding back definition. Every formula is clinically tested exclusively on women over 40, too.
Perhaps most refreshing of all is that none of it feels apologetic. This isn't beauty for women over 40 dressed up in wafty euphemisms, nor is youth being held up as the end goal. It's smart, it's solving a genuine need and, judging by the brand's trajectory so far, women were eagerly waiting for it: Sarah Creal Beauty reportedly turned over $10 million in its first year in the US, and I suspect the UK will prove every bit as receptive.
Turns out, you can build an exciting new beauty brand without trying to make a 21-year-old want it—or convincing a 40-year-old she should look like one. Funny that.
Beauty Buzz: Dyson's £400 Toothbrush
I love a Dyson keynote. They’re the beauty equivalent of a Steve Jobs iPhone reveal: the showmanship, the fanfare, the almost comical juxtaposition between Sir James Dyson’s understatement and the engineering spectacle of what he’s actually presenting. The latest took place in Paris on Tuesday and revealed an entirely new category for Dyson: oral care. More specifically, a toothbrush.
Except the Dyson CameraJet™ isn’t really just a toothbrush. It brushes, flosses and rinses simultaneously, using a tiny 100k-pixel camera and machine learning to scan your mouth 28 times a second, identify the gaps between your teeth and, within 100 milliseconds of spotting one, fire a precisely targeted, one-millisecond conical jet of mouthwash into it. It can even livestream the inside of your mouth to the MyDyson app, where you can see your brushing coverage and get feedback on things like overpressure and over-scrubbing. Six years of R&D, 470,000 dental images used to train its machine-learning system and 16 million lines of code have gone into making brushing your teeth considerably more technologically advanced.
And it costs a cool £419.99.
At first, I gasped along with the rest of the world. £420? For a toothbrush? But then I started thinking: how much does a top-of-the-range electric toothbrush actually cost these days? Philips Sonicare's premium models have retailed for £599.99, while Oral-B's iO10 carries an £800 price tag. Suddenly, Dyson's pricing doesn't seem quite as deranged as the headlines suggest.
And, impressive though those other existing brands' brushes are, they don't have a camera watching your teeth in real time, recognising each interdental gap and automatically firing mouthwash into it as you brush.
So, yes, £420 is an objectively enormous amount of money to spend on a toothbrush. But if it can combine brushing, interdental cleaning and mouth rinsing into one two-minute routine—and make people more likely to do the bit of oral hygiene so many of us skip—I'm not convinced it's the most ridiculous £400 beauty-tech purchase I've encountered. (Plus, think of all the money you'll save on dental work over the years.)
Do I need one? Absolutely not. Do I now desperately want to watch a tiny camera locate the gaps between my teeth and precision-blast them clean? Yes, I think I do. Don't you?
