Dame Anita Roddick
Posted by charley on July 5th, 2008Founder of The Body Shop and environmental entrepreneur Anita Roddick died yesterday evening after suffering a major brain haemorrhage, aged 64. Two years ago she found out she was carrying the Hepatitis C virus through a blood transfusion she received, but it has not been the cause of her death.
Anita has been a role model of mine for a number of years, ever since i became a vegetarian in 2001, and I’ve been interested in her business ventures after she left The Body Shop. She was there way before Bob Geldof and his LiveAid, forming the Body Shop in 1976 and showing consumers that business could be ethical as well as exotic. Her beauty products were free of animal testing and used ingredients from 3rd world countries, trading fairly and ethically with them. She was talking about and acting on Fair Trade long before Oxfam made it fashionable. I remember the first time i went into the The Body Shop and my Auntie explained to me that nothing in there had been tested on an animal, and it blew my mind. I hadn’t even realised that anything would be tested on a defenseless creature, and i began to think more about the products i used and where they came from. I think if not for Anita Roddick, my passion for vegetarianism and campaigning against animal cruelty would not be with me today.
She was a wise businesswoman, ahead of her time, and a co-worker stated that “She had a great passion for life, a great passion for business and for people. She was very warm, very witty, and very clever“. She had just agreed to be a chairwoman for Reprieve, an anti death penalty charity, before she died and was an active campaigner for Greenpeace and Amnesty International. Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said Dame Anita’s passion for human rights was “immeasurable“, which was also very clear in the setting up of her own HIV and AIDS charity ‘Body and Soul’.
Many feel that society has lost an important and irreplaceable figure, who dedicated years of her life to raise awareness to help and support others. Her passions were not only for human rights, but for animal rights too as The Body Shop still holds its ethical values and continues to run independently even under the L’Oreal name. So even though she is no longer with us, her legacy will still continue and her name still associated with the good causes she has founded.