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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: September 2007
Body Shop founder Anita Roddick dies at age 64
Anita Roddick, 64, who founded the 50-nation,
2,000-store Body Shop cosmetics store chain with a single shop in Brighton,
England, in 1976, died on September 10, 2007 from a major brain hemorrhage.
Roddick had acquired hepatitis C from
a blood transfusion in 1971, while giving birth to a daughter, but her
chronic illness had no evident connection with her death.
"Roddick, known as the 'Queen of
Green,' was lauded around the world for trailblazing business practices
that promoted environmentalism and other causes dear to her heart, from
human rights to Third World debt relief," memorialized D'Arcy Doran
of Associated Press. Added PETA vice president Dan Matthews, "Before
Body Shop you could only find cruelty-free products in hippie shops. Now
they are everywhere." Said Humane Society of the U.S. president Wayne
Pacelle, "Her commitment to ending the use of animals in cosmetics
testing, first in the European Union and then in the world, was never
overshadowed by the economic success of The Body Shop. Untold numbers
of rabbits and other animals were spared due to her staunch 'against animal
testing' policy."
However, the Body Shop image took a hit
in 1994 from two-time Emmy Award-winning ABC and NBC television news producer
Jon Entine, who won a National Press Club award for an exposé published
in the journal Business Ethics. Initially, Entine alleged, Roddick "didn't
have any interest in animal testing as an issue. Her cosmetologist, Mark
Constantine, insisted on having a no-animal-testing policy, and then she
got interested when it made money." Entine argued that the Body Shop
maintained a no-animal-testing façade through a policy of not using
any substance within five years of it being tested on animals, which he
contended means little because animal testing of new products is often
done more than five years before they reach the market; by purchasing
ingredients from wholesalers who don't develop new products and therefore
don't do any testing; and by circumvention.
"In an internal memo dated May 19,
1992," Entine wrote, "the Body Shop's purchasing manager acknowledged
that 46.5% of its ingredients had been tested on animals, up from 34%
the year before." Body Shop memos issued in 1991 and 1992 indicate
that from 53.2% to 59.7% of ingredients as of then were not animal-tested,
while about 28% had been animal-tested within a decade."
A German court in 1989 barred the Body
Shop from using statements such as, "We test neither our raw materials
nor our end products on animals," on grounds this would be misleading
advertising. Upon appeal, the verdict was upheld by the Higher Regional
Court of Dusseldorf, which found no substantial difference between the
animal testing policy of The Body Shop and that of other cosmetics manufacturers.
Roddick and her husband withdrew from
directing the Body Shop chain in 2002, and in 2006 sold it to the French
firm L'Oreal, a longtime target of PETA boycotts, for $1.14 billion.
"Roddick said it was a chance for Body Shop, which remains independently run, despite its new owners, to teach its new parent company," wrote Doran.