Building a powerhouse beauty brand

Jamie O'Banion, a former Miss Teen Texas, developed a passion for chemistry at the age of 12, out of which she created a $100m cosmetics company.

923-MM-Jamie-O'Banion

It would be easy to dismiss Jamie O'Banion (pictured) as "just another pretty face", says Rebecca Sherman in PaperCity. But the former Miss Teen Texas is more "Fortune 500 than Baywatch". Her passion for chemistry emerged at the age of 12 when her physician father, Dr Terry James, bought a local research laboratory that developed products for medical specialists, such as plastic surgeons and dermatologists. After graduating in marketing, O'Banion joined her father at his company, creating ingredients for beauty products. In 2011, she set up her own company, Beauty Bioscience, to launch a recently patented product, RetinoSyn-45 serum, live on the Home Shopping Channel. The 3,000 units sold out within 24 hours and the "turbo wrinkle reducer" remains her company's bestseller.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.