The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
“My first memory of beauty is trying on my mum’s lipstick the first time I was left in the house on my own,” Isle of Paradise founder Jules Von Hep tells me. “I must have been about eight. I can’t remember what lipstick is was, but I think it was a Chanel one. I think the real product where I fell in love with beauty was Aveda’s Exfoliating Shampoo. I remember being in the shower at university, washing my hair and thinking ‘This is incredible. It’s so extra- this is my kind of beauty.’ The Elvive was cast to the side and I was straight into high end shampoo.”
Originally from Yorkshire and having lived in Manchester and London while growing up, Jules didn’t consider a career in beauty an option. “I went to a big, posh boy’s school and we were always told that careers involved law, or medicine, or physics,” he explains. “All the things that sent my eyes like a cartoon frog. I choose fashion as my degree, and in my first internship they had a beauty PR section. That’s when I first discovered beauty.”
That choice, to study fashion, was one Jules decided after flipping a coin. “It was going to be fashion or interior design,” he recalls. “I went round to all the universities in Scotland, found all the interior design courses and was absolutely sold on it, and the night before my gut just went ‘No, this isn’t right.’ I flipped, and I said ‘Dad, if it lands on tails, I’m doing fashion.’ Boom, tails. I scrubbed out all my university forms, filled in all these courses that I’d never even looked at and sent it in. I wasn’t the easiest teenager, so my parents were just happy that I was even going to university.”
It took several years of studying, interning and working in the fashion industry before Jules moved into the beauty sphere. “There’s so many elements of fashion that made me know it wasn’t the right industry for me,” he tells me. “It’s such an incredible industry, and the creations that fashion designers make for runway shows are amazing. To work as a fashion professional is such a way of life that I found quite offensive. I heard, at a Calvin Klein casting, somebody tell a model to go and vomit in the toilet before a show. I was only 21 and I was struggling with eating disorders myself and I remember thinking ‘No. This isn’t for me.’ I need friendliness and warmth. Fashion, from my experience, wasn’t giving me that.”
Moving away from the fashion industry, Jules found himself assisting renowned skincare, tanning and nail expert Nichola Joss- a position he held for upwards of four years. “I met Nichola through Saint Tropez when I was working there,” Jules says. “I started as a third assistant, so I was the bitch that got the coffees, I was the one who took the cloths home and washed them, I packed that kit up and unpacked it. It’s the most un-glamorous thing ever, but when you’re doing shows, when you’re on jobs and travelling with that one person, you learn everything. Moving into second and first [assistants], it’s such a growth and a gorgeous time, but I got to a point where even Nichola knew that I was ready to not be her assistant anymore because she’d reach for something and I’d know exactly what she needed. I owe so much to Nichola. I didn’t know that tan could be used the way it can be used until I started working with Nichola.
“I would assist her on shoots during the week, and on the weekend I would do Dancing With The Stars and X Factor. When I joined Dancing With The Stars, I’d been poached from X Factor. I said to them, in the meeting, ‘What’s really sad about your show is that it’s known for bad tans. That’s all I’m reading. Why? Why have you let it get like this? It should be about the amazing contestants. You need me to change this. You need me to turn this around.’ And I did it.”
It was Jules’ approach to spray tanning that saw the ‘Dancing’ aesthetic shift so dramatically- an approach that has since seen Jules become the go-to tanner for the likes of Kate Moss, Blake Lively, Kendall Jenner, Sienna Miller. “It’s the attention to detail,” Jules explains of his point of difference. “It’s listening to your clients, it’s listening to what they want, and it’s knowing your place. I’m very open and honest with their clients when they book me. I say ‘If you want that mahogany, deep, bronze, and if you want to change your skin tone by 12 shades, hun, I’m not the tanner for you. If you want glow, if you want sun kissed and you want undetectable tan, then I’m your man.’ An appointment with me is so much more than in, spray, go. In various treatments I’ll use crystals, we’ll do a little bit of cleansing, I cleanse the whole room with Palo Santo before you come in. The energy is different. If you imagine having a spray tan, it’s a really liberating feeling standing and being naked, so I really focus on that. I really make people feel comfortable. I’m more than a spray tanner- I’m a body confidence champion. I’m that person who’s stood at the sidelines for you with the pom poms and miniskirt attempting to do a high kick.”
Jules wasn’t satisfied, however, with his reputation as the world’s best spray tanner- he wanted to formulate the world’s best tan. “I was so ready to give up. I was ready to stop tanning. I got to the point where my kits were so big, and I just couldn’t connect with a single tan out there. I looked at the bottles, I looked at the branding, I smelled them, I saw the end results, I saw the fade, and I thought ‘Is this it? Is this all we’ve got? Dry, stinky, orange, patchy, itchy tans?’ That’s when I said it. I remember the exact moment. I was standing in Boots, in London, and I thought ‘If I don’t do this, nobody’s going to do it. I need to flip this category upside down. I need to talk about body confidence. I need to combine makeup and tan together. I need to just make it fun again.’ Tanning isn’t about looking like somebody else. That’s not what tanning is to me. It’s the cloak of confidence, it’s the sheet of happiness, it’s when you skip down the street and people look at you and you catch your reflection and go ‘Yassssss!'”
“Nobody tells you how hard it is,” Jules explains of the formulation process. “Honestly, it’s so hard. I was so adamant that it was all going to be made in one factory in the UK, because to say that you’re vegan, to say that you’re cruelty free, to really stamp those claims on, I’m not going to lie. There’s a lot of grey lines, but when you know where it’s all made and you can visit the labs, meet the people and put on the white jacket and you, yourself have got the goggles on, you know what’s going down. But it’s hard. It’s hard, the conversations are hard, and what you might believe for you and your world might not necessarily be how everyone else sees things- so you have to change things.”
Despite such a clear vision for the brand, Jules struggled with one element in particular- deciding on a name. “When you’re trying to think of a name, you literally walk around things and you’re like ‘Lamp. Lamp Tan. Wood Tan. Panel Tan. Duvet, oh my god, suitcase, oh my god, ice cream, sprinkles, Sprinkle Tan.’ Your brain is like ADHD for tanning names, so I stripped it all back. When I need to get creative I have to go somewhere on my own. I need a banging playlist, I need a glass of wine, and I need to just sit and meditate for a bit and get in the zone. I thought about what makes me happy. Why do I tan? Well, I tan to go shopping with my mum, I tan to see my girlfriends, I tan to take selfies, and I tan to make me feel more confident. Those times that I’m wearing tan is paradise. So Isle of Paradise is the mental state of mind that you take yourself to when you are tanned.”
An element of the product that Jules spent less time agonising over, however, was the scent. He knew what he wanted from the get go- a scent inspired by Sydney, the place he credits with changing him as a person and enabling him to feel comfortable in his own skin. “When you create your own product, it’s the most insane feeling because you literally get to do exactly what you want. It’s such a surreal experience because, as an expert, you’re given formulations, you’re given products, you’re told what to say- you’re basically like a performing monkey. But then all your knowledge that you’ve learnt from working with bodies, skin types, tones, textures and all the complaints and problems you’ve heard from clients and press and from followers on social along the way, it comes to the point where you bring out the answer to all of that. The fragrance was so important because I knew that Isle of Paradise was going to stand so separate from every other brand. I knew what I wanted to do- I’m not swimming the same way as every other fish. Eucalyptus and peppermint is inspired by my time in Sydney because it’s confidence and happiness in a bottle, and that’s what Sydney did to me.”
Where many niche beauty brands choose to launch with one “signature” product, Jules chose to buck the trend. “The core products all came at the same time,” he tells me. “The drops, the mousse and the waters were all really the ones in the pipeline. It’s a big range. We launched with 13 skews, and for a brand to launch with 13 it’s like ‘I’m here!’ A lot of experts launch with one or two to dip the toe in, but not this one!
“I was adamant that we needed three shades, because I’d spent so long listening to my clients and it was ‘I was a light tan and I want to glow.’ I knew peach colour correcting was a thing, because I was putting it on the skin backstage. Green mixed in with tan corrects redness and inflammation, and that’s a very common skin type, so we added in a green pigment super balance complex and Agastache Mexicana Flower which is a derivative of mint, so it cools the skin. Violet based is an obvious colour theory- you put violet in and it cancels yellow and orange tones so it neutralises the tan so you get the best dark tan possible. I knew my pillars that I needed.”
Another element Jules was adamant about was the manner in which the products would be marketed- on real women. “We can’t use the word sexy in any media in any way, shape or form. No girl on the Instagram feed is to look provocative. That’s a huge thing for Isle of Paradise. It’s not about that. Everything has to be super colloquial, because that’s how I am. We never lie. I can’t lie. It’s about real bodies.
“You can go out into the stores and you can see most of the tanning campaigns that are still active from three years ago, and I did those spray tans. For me, when I stood there doing those tans, I had to smile and nod and be that person knowing that that’s what the client wants, but on the inside I was crying. That, for me, was not a true representation of women, of bodies, of textures, of sizes or of skin tones. It was just really demoralising. When we started Isle of Paradise, it was very much in the brand’s DNA that we were using real bodies. I didn’t care if a retailer didn’t like it. We fought hard. I had to say ‘This is the right thing to do. You have to trust me.’
“The night before we launched was shit scary because no other beauty brands were doing it. It. Went. Loco. It was so obvious that the world was ready for real. The DMs that I got, and even now, saying ‘Thank you for using bodies that look like mine.’ It’s such an honour to be able to stand and know, on my death bed, ‘You nailed that Jules.'”
It’s Jules passion for body confidence that has seen him become a global advocate for the cause with a message that all humans deserve to hear.
“It’s important to recognise that body confidence doesn’t mean taking off your clothes, putting on a pair of heels and walking down the street like a bad ass. That is not body confidence. Body confidence doesn’t happen overnight. Even I, a body confidence advocate, have days where I wobble- because I’m a human being and I live in this society. Body confidence is about remembering that there is no magic wand that’s going to come in and wave it and go ‘Here’s the body of Blake Lively. Tada!’ It’s just not going to happen.
Close your eyes now and wiggle your toes- your body is a physical being that was made up from two genetic compounds from your parents, and you are a matter of cells and water. Really, your body is the vessel that is carrying you through this life. You have a choice. You can either hate your body and repeatedly manifest everything that you hate, or you can change that thought process and focus on the bits that you love and are grateful for. We are so lucky that we can walk. We are so lucky that our bodies can do what they do. Get a fucking grip- there are so many people who have so many physical impairments and issues and people who have such hard lives, that really, in our society, we shouldn’t be moaning about our bodies- we should be grateful.
Get a piece of paper. On one side, put ‘Things I Like.’ On the other, put ‘Things I Don’t.’ Draw a line down the middle and write everything on either side. Stare at it, tear the piece of paper in half, and scrunch up the half with the things you don’t like and throw it in the bin. Say ‘I’m done.’ Because babe, you’re done. Life’s too short. Make peace with your body.
I thing I’ve noticed, especially with women, it’s like standing around a cauldron talking about the things you hate about yourselves. Don’t. Fucking. Do it. Don’t sit in that circle. Stop doing it. You’re all dragging each other down. It’s a massive shame spiral. What is your existence? What are you doing?
You are not defined by your body. I have tanned women with one leg. I have tanned women so weak from going through cancer surgery and who have leukaemia that can’t stand in the booth and have to sit down. I’ve tanned women who have had mastectomies. I’ve tanned women who struggle with their appearance, who can’t bare to put the robe down and have their eyes shut the whole time because they can’t look in the mirror- but I never judge that person. What I judge them by is did they make me a cup of tea when I arrived? Did you give me a hug when I left? Did you smile? Did you make me laugh? That’s what makes you.
You’re not defined by your body. The moment that penny dropped for me, my life got better. The less fucks I gave, the happier I became.”
