I've spent 30 years in beauty - and this is why you're paying too much for skincare: Beauty Pie founder Marcia Kilgore

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OMG, are you kidding me?’ was Marcia Kilgore’s reaction when she had to buy a moisturiser ‘like a civilian’ at a Hong Kong airport. She was outraged at its cost. ‘It was £100 but I knew it was worth maybe £10 max.’ Kilgore knew this because she had spent three decades creating beauty lines. ‘I’ve sat in the labs. I know what a kilo of good cream base costs, what the actives add to the price, what the jar and the carton add. Read enough ingredient lists and they start being receipts.’

Kilgore grew up in Canada with ‘bad skin’ which inspired her to create Bliss Spa, New York’s coolest beauty salon, in 1996. I visited her there a few years after launch and the salon was buzzing. Her client list included Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Julia Roberts and Calvin Klein and was so zeitgeisty an episode of Sex And The City was filmed there.

A serial entrepreneur, Kilgore then created the Bliss Spa product range, originally sold to clients ‘to keep the vibes going’. It then went into retail stores, being stocked in the UK in Harvey Nichols and Selfridges. After that she launched affordable bath and body lines Soap & Glory in 2006 and Soaper Duper in 2016. The former sold to Walgreens Boots Alliance in 2014 for a reported £40 to £50 million. The latter closed post Covid due to raised ingredient prices. In between came the shoe brand FitFlop, which she founded in 2007 and still owns today.

All this means Kilgore knows a lot about labs, factories, packaging and ingredients. She reckons your average product is sold for 12 times more than the formula inside it costs. So, in 2016 she came up with Beauty Pie to allow customers to access prestige products at wholesale prices.

Marcia Kilgore

She did this using a membership model: you pay a yearly fee of £59, which gets you unlimited access to buy Beauty Pie products at near wholesale (called member) prices. Oh, and cutting out retail stores, celebrity ambassadors and fancy-pants packaging means you are only paying ‘three, maybe four times more than the formula cost’.

If you don’t want to commit to a subscription you can pay full price for your products, which are still reasonable (eg £28 for the Super Healthy Skin Daily Moisturiser vs £15 member price).

The products are good. Kilgore is savvy about skin, make-up, fragrance and hair products. She knows how to find the most efficacious and elegant formulas. Her style is cool. Her vibe is fun. The packaging is unfussy but still chic. And the customer experience is good. I’ve asked around and every single person who has signed up has been happy.

In the ten years since launch, Kilgore says customers have become more educated. ‘They read ingredient lists, they’ve started asking, is it worth it? Which is an inconvenient question for a lot of the beauty industry but not for us.’ Her own routine has progressed in that time, too. Her non-negotiables are now ‘proper cleansing in the evening, LED mask three times a week and a retinoid at night plus niacinamide and vitamin C somewhere in my routine daily.’ She avoids tanning (the UV-related version, not faux glow) and smoking. She wears SPF ‘every day, including the grey ones – it isn’t the thrilling part of skincare, but it’s what stops everything else you’re doing from being a very expensive hobby!’

Beauty Pie has gathered famous fans, from Reese Witherspoon to Hailey Bieber, but has Kilgore encountered backlash from the luxury brands she’s undercutting? She says they’ve stayed silent on her pronouncements that people are overpaying ‘because they know it’s the truth’. She happily tells me without fear of reprisal that the Beauty Pie Le Masque Micro-Caviar (£35 member price) and the Dior Prestige Le Micro-Caviar de Rose (£418) are similar in everything except their price points.

This thinking aligns with YOU’s new beauty manifesto to have 80 per cent of products on our pages costing under £20. Recently, though, there have been two controversial Beauty Pie developments. Some products have become more expensive (Youthbomb Night Cream is £49 even to members) and it also now has a retail space in London’s Liberty store. Kilgore says the raised prices are because everything has got more costly (true dat) and because she has tweaked the way membership works. 

Originally, it ran on a points system where you got an allowance of products for a set price, then needed to pay more if you wanted to purchase over and above that. Now you can buy as much as you want and that’s factored into the (now raised) yearly membership cost of £59. Skincare has also gone up as ‘actives cost more’ and new products contain expensive ingredients like ‘microencapsulated retinol (£500 per kg) and spicules, needle-like microscopic structures that help boost absorption (£1,360 per kg)’. Kilgore says the retail space in Liberty is more of a pop-up, where customers can play with the products and either pay full price or sign up on the spot for member prices.

Even after a decade, Kilgore’s biggest challenge is still fighting against people’s ‘deeply held belief that if something doesn’t cost a lot of money it can’t be good’. Beauty Pie is proof it absolutely can be.

Marcia’s mighty buys under £20 

My skin swells up like crazy when I am bitten by mosquitoes. One or two rubs of this on a bite and it’s like nothing happened.

This natural spray elevates any airline seat, any hotel room, any unfortunately scented Uber.

Swiss, I think. My friend told me about these and I have never looked back.

These enormous blocky soaps look amazing in a bathroom, and transport you back to a simpler time.