Investor's Business Daily has published a lovely profile of Dame Anita Roddick. Thanks to Miho Nagano for doing a spectacular job of capturing Anita. Click below for an excerpt and link, after the jump.

She Was A Cosmetic Crusader

By MIHO NAGANO, Investor's Business Daily

Anita Roddick showed that pursuing social change and making a profit can work together.

By campaigning against animal testing for cosmetics and selling body care products made out of natural ingredients, Roddick made a fortune and created an environmentally friendly marketplace long before it became trendy.

Roddick opened the first Body Shop store in 1976 in Brighton, England. In 30 years, the tiny store grew to a global brand of more than 2,100 stores in 55 countries, with sales hitting $1.5 bil in 2006.

Along the way, the Confederation of British Industry chose the Body Shop as company of the year in 1987.

On the social front, Roddick was collecting 4 million signatures to demand no more animal testing in the cosmetic industry. That pushed England to ban the practice in 1998.

The Body Shop's products in reusable plastic containers also sent a simple message: Nothing will make you stay young forever, but those creams and lotions make you feel better about yourself.

That was revolutionary in the multibillion-dollar cosmetic industry, which promotes some cream as a brake against aging. That campaign among cosmetic giants leads to the use of supermodels for ads to promote the image of beauty.

Roddick contended she never spent a cent on ads and was upfront about anti-aging creams, calling them "God's way of separating the stupid from their money."

"I have never met someone from the cosmetics industry who doesn't know — with absolute certainty — that nothing they produce can do anything more than cleanse, polish and protect the skin and hair," she wrote in her book "Body and Soul."

Don't Gloss It Over

Roddick added: "It is immoral constantly to make women feel dissatisfied with their bodies. It is immoral to use a photograph of a glowing 16-year-old to sell a cream aimed at preventing wrinkles in a 40-year-old."

"She turned her rebellion into business," said John Bird, founder of Big Issue, a magazine sold by homeless people worldwide. "I can't think about anybody before her who was successfully combining social justice and business."

Roddick developed her feel for what works while growing up as Anita Perella in an Italian immigrant family in the seaside town of Littlehampton, England. She said she always felt like an outsider.

"Even when I was small, I realized we were different from English families," Roddick wrote in "Body and Soul." "We were noisy, always screaming and shouting."

Amid that din, Roddick learned to stand up and be different, says Brooke Biggs, her editor and a partner at Anita Roddick Publishing.

The Perellas' Italian restaurant stayed open from 5 a.m. until the last customer left — as opposed to most stores that closed at 5 p.m. sharp. Anita later recalled the cafe's smell of garlic and tomatoes and of working there every day.

When she was 10, she read a book about the Holocaust and felt her first moral outrage.

A decade later, she was on the street speaking up for homeless people. After working as a schoolteacher, she traveled to Africa, did jobs for the United Nations and ran a restaurant with her husband, Gordon Roddick, whom she met at a nightclub her mother ran.

Two daughters later, Gordon told her he was planning a two-year adventure trip. That meant she had to make money on her own.

An idea hit her when she was at a cosmetic chain store. Looking at a shelf filled with large-sized bottles of body lotion, she thought: "Why couldn't I buy a small size of a cream or lotion so I could try it out before buying a big bottle?"

She scratched that irritation by opening a cosmetic store.

Roddick never cared about fancy packages. Her passion was natural ingredients. While visiting Tahiti, she saw women rubbing cocoa butter on to each other's bodies. She noticed that even though those women were exposed to the sun, their skin was smooth and soft.

That convinced her the locals had the right touch. So when she returned to England, Roddick mixed ingredients in her kitchen. She wanted a concoction that would spread the Tahitian experience.

Not getting it quite right, she approached cosmetic makers asking if they would make small quantities with natural ingredients such as Rhassoul mud from Africa. She wanted to take the mixes and make her own creams. The firms told her they knew nothing about the mud.

"I think they thought I was completely mad," she wrote.

She finally found a herbalist in the Yellow Pages, and he agreed to make products using natural items such as cocoa butter, jojoba oil and aloe vera. The catch: He wanted $1,400 upfront.

So she asked a bank for a $7,900 loan, explaining her vision. The bank said no, until her husband — just before his trek — persuaded the bank manager. "In the '70s in England, not many people were surprised that women couldn't get loans for business," Biggs told IBD. "But Anita was really surprised, and she never applied that to herself, nor imagined failing."

Some called Roddick naive. "But her refusal of get rid of naivete was worth $500 million," Biggs said.

With the $7,900, she rented a place for a store and painted the walls dark green. Not to make an eco-statement; green was the only color that could hide moldy spots.

Now her one-woman business was ready — with 25 products. She called it the Body Shop.

Soon the Body Shop started franchising after Gordon returned.

While Anita came up with ideas for new products, Gordon handled bottling and labeling. She was the creator and he the action man. As franchise stores grew across Europe, the company went public in 1984 at the London Stock Exchange — and the share price shot up 50% on the first day.

Roddick later often said going public was the biggest mistake she made, because she started losing control of the company.

As the Body Shop campaigned against animal testing, some in the media criticized her company for using some ingredients that were tested on animals.

The Body Shop now states on its Web site that none of its products or ingredients have been tested or retested on animals since Dec. 31, 1990.

When she sold the Body Shop to the French cosmetic giant L'Oreal for $1.1 bil in 2006, some criticized the move as a sellout.

One who spoke out was Dan Welch of England's Ethical Consumer magazine.

"There was dismay among animal rights people and people in ethical consumers' movement," he told IBD of the buyout. "The ethical policy of the Body Shop has not been compromised. However, it's now a part of L'Oreal group, which undermined its reputation among animal rights campaigners."

L'Oreal says it stopped animal testing on its "finished products" in 1989, but has yet to ban animal testing.

On The Inside

Roddick saw the sale as an opportunity to share ethics in the cosmetic industry. Bird said, "You've got to get people inside to change rather than waiting for citizens' fists to pound the door."

After selling the business, Roddick devoted herself full time to human rights, protecting the rain forest in South America, indigenous farmers' rights, AIDS, poverty and child labor. Queen Elizabeth appointed her a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in 2003. After Roddick died of a brain hemorrhage last September at age 64, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called her "one of the country's true pioneers" and an "inspiration" to businesswomen.