I’m exactly the right age (46) to look back with nostalgia on the significant part that The Body Shop played in my teen years. I can clearly remember the excitement of Saturdays in town, scraping pennies together to buy little pots of fruit-scented eye gel or lip balm, and the fact that every single house party smelled, not like Teen Spirit, but of White Musk, a popular Body Shop perfume, whose scent came to encapsulate the 90s.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were few beauty brands that spoke to young people the way that The Body Shop did. They were radical, they cared about animal testing (which was pretty much ubiquitous at the time) and everything smelled so sweet and fruity…