Lush co-founder Mark Constantine: ‘I was homeless. I spent a lot of my time scared’

Mark Constantine was born in July 1952 in Sutton, London, and grew up in Weymouth, Dorset. He became homeless at the age of 16, but managed to complete an apprenticeship as a hairdresser. At the age of 21, he started making herbal hair products while studying to become a trichologist.

Five years later, he opened the Herbal Hair And Beauty Clinic in Poole. After sending his products to The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, he became a major supplier. He co-founded the natural cosmetics company Lush in 1995 with a shop in Poole – today there are over 800 branches in over 50 countries.

He is married to Mo and with whom he has three children. For his Letter to My Younger Self, he looks back on a tough start, and the three women who changed his life.

When I was 16 I was homeless, so my main preoccupation would have been cycling somewhere dry. I fell out with my parents after my mum married again. And the man that she married was actually… well, to be honest, it was a violent household. My stepdad would punch me in the face. It was just unhappy. For a while I had my nan, who was very lovely, and she brought me up, with my mum living there as well. We left when I was 12, and my nan died very quickly afterwards. And I don’t think I realised quite so much at the time, but it was a huge deal to me. So it was a difficult four years or five years of my life. Eventually I got locked out of my house by my mum. 

I was an apprentice hairdresser, when I was homeless, and I kept my job the whole time. I just couldn’t afford a room. I went to sleep in the woods for a bit. I didn’t have a tent. I just had a poncho that I used to put over the top of me. Most of the time it was dry anyway, so it wasn’t too bad. I never made a bivouac because I don’t know how to make a bivouac.  

Was I scared? There were noises but I got used to the noises, and now I’m quite an expert on nighttime noises. But I spent a lot of my time scared, I think. I slept on people’s sofas. My wife was my girlfriend at that stage, so I stayed in her parents’ house. And then after a while, my best friend Jeff [Osment, who went on to write Mark’s biography Dear John] – his parents put me up. He was my best friend from school, from Cub Scouts. His parents were so kind, and they put me up a lot. 

I did try and find my dad. I didn’t look for him when I was a teenager but at different times in my life, I looked for him. I once phoned all the John Constantines in the book, and I may have even got him, and he may have chosen not to answer me properly. But much later, Jeff found him. He was still alive. He was in South Africa, and I went to see him within three or four days of finding out. It was satisfying. Where I’d had an empty hearth, there was a little fire. 

After my nan died of a heart attack, a fear of heart attacks entered me when I was about 12. That created panic attacks in me. One of the things I’d like to do for my younger self is give myself a few bits of advice to avoid the panic attacks. I spent most of my life having those, so it would have been nice if I’d have got the hang of controlling them. There were times when they got out of hand. 

My first room, after a charity gave me some money, was over at a fish and chip shop. By then I had already found the love of my life, my wife, Mo, but she was just my girlfriend then. And after I’d taken the room and paid the deposit, the woman told me I wasn’t allowed any girls in the house, so Mo couldn’t even come in the peeing rain. So after about six months I found a place that wasn’t like that.  

I met Mo at an all-night party. It was lovely, and she’s done a lot to build me up. The way I put it is, I could feel her hands on my heart. I hadn’t realised just how much she reassured me until Jeff did the book about me. In the pictures in there I could see how encouraging she was. Suddenly I saw this woman who was reassuring and looking at me. In our wedding pictures, she’s looking up at me very reassuringly, really nice. 

I studied to be a trichologist, hair and scalp diseases, and that included organic chemistry, and I got very nerdy. Even though I was out of home, I was studying all the time, reading all the time, and so I got more or less every qualification you could get as a hairdresser. But I wasn’t very good at hairdressing so I got qualified as a trichologist, which takes about three years of home study. I used to make products for a couple of different hairdressers, and then I met Anita Roddick [founder of The Body Shop] and made products for her. That was great. She was a great influence. 

If I went back to tell my younger self what would happen in his life, I think it might reassure him a bit. Because I was just so focused on surviving. You know, at that stage, I don’t think I ever really calmed down. The whole effect of that period of time made me very driven and protective and intense. I think I don’t know how pleasant I was to live with in that state. Meeting Anita was great, but it was pretty stressful because I was only in my 20s, and I was having to cope with growing a business at such a rate. It was just massive. She used to phone
up and place a Christmas order with me, and then another one, and then another one, so it was all very intense. 

It got to the end with The Body Shop. They really couldn’t be seen to be having an external manufacturer that dominated their business, which I did. So basically we launched a mail-order catalogue called Cosmetics to Go, but it wasn’t a success. Everybody talks to me about it still today. Every boarding house, everybody in a school away from home was getting the catalogues, and they were loving it. But we lost a pound on every order. We tried to get to a certain size, and we couldn’t. And then we lost our business, and went bust. And Lush sort of came up out of the ashes. We went back into 29 High Street in Poole. We started making stuff up upstairs and selling it downstairs, and things went from there. The next shop was in Covent Garden, and the next one was in King’s Road, and the King’s Road was the one that just bloody took off like fury. 

Read more:

• Without The Body Shop, there’d have been no Big Issue
• ‘Vegans lost the battle, but they won the war’: The truth about the anti-vegan backlash
• How The Body Shop shapes businesses to make a better world

There’s an awful lot of good people who like to work for us. Someone said to me a little while ago, “I hold myself to a very high standard, Mark, and I hold you to it too.” And I think that’s bloody fabulous. And that’s very much the way the business is. I’m not a vegan, but we have lots of vegans here, and for a lot of the people that work for us, that’s their main thing. So I think the big endorsement for us is the fact that so many people come and they never leave. They contribute at such a level. We’ve got lots of great people for whom it is their life. 

Mo and I got offered the OBE. Mo said I had to have it. She said, “Well, I’m fucking having mine”, and added, “I thought when John Lennon turned his down, he was a dick.” [Lennon was awarded an MBE alongside the other Beatles in 1965, but handed it back by way of protest in 1969]. So that was the end of that. I was definitely having mine, though I probably would have been as dicky as him left to my own devices. But it was great that
we did it. We had it from the Queen, and she said, “We see this as a pat on the back.” And I think that was a lovely thing to say, especially to us.  

If I was to give my younger self advice about getting older I’d say try not to be so intense. Give yourself a break. It’s not that bad. I’m a worrier in the night, not in the day. I’m fine in the day. I can do all sorts of ballsy things in the day, and then I worry about them in the middle of the night. But I think it’s been nice, getting old. I didn’t think I would. I can say to my younger self I’m more on top of things now. I’ve had psychological help, and I recommend that to anybody. 

If I could have one last conversation with anyone, it’s got to be Anita Roddick, hasn’t it? I’d love to just talk to her. In a way we were similar because she always worried about dying [Roddick died aged 64 from a stroke in 2007]. She was constantly concerned about that and would be quite nervous in the evenings and trying to get to sleep and things like that. So, I would have a conversation with her because I just loved her so much.  

If I could re-live one day – I think my wife would be surprised because I didn’t really enjoy it at the time – but I think I’d quite like to have my wedding day again. I was 21, and I was uptight, But I would quite like just to be able to show my commitment and my love for my wife again. 

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