Dear John

In July 1973, at the age of 21, Mark Constantine OBE started making herbal hair products while studying to become a trichologist. Over 50 years later he still works out of his first hair and beauty clinic in Poole High Street, although today at the head of the global cosmetics retailer LUSH. Dear John tells the rags to riches story of how a headstrong young man went from earning £20 a week treating hair and scalp conditions with home-made remedies; to becoming the major product inventor for The Body Shop; and co-founding the LUSH natural cosmetics brand operating 900 shops in over 45 countries. Mark’s story came to a grinding halt in March 2020 when the Covid pandemic closed almost every LUSH shop in the world. Coming hard on the heels of Brexit, another body blow for LUSH which employs thousands of EU citizens both in the UK and across Europe, things couldn’t get much worse. Unless you happened to operate 50 shops in Russia and Ukraine and a tragedy was about to envelop your family. Before all of Mark’s success, two boys growing up in the seaside resort of Weymouth began a 60-year friendship, where one was the hare and the other, the tortoise. That journey reached an epic climax in South Africa in 2012 and it spurred the hare to keep on running even harder than before. Another decade has passed but the tortoise has finally caught up again, and is the author of this expanded second edition of Dear John, which brings the often controversial life of Mark Constantine and the story of LUSH right up to date.