Dame Anita Roddick, who has died aged 64 after a brain haemorrhage, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The year is important. The beauty business was not then about bodies, which were merely the soaped tail end of the face and hair market, its lotions laboratory tested, industrially concocted and sold through chemists' chains or the phoney salons of department stores.
None of this connected with the 1970s change in how women wanted to pamper and present themselves. The Body Shop came from that radical sensibility that produced the self-help book, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), much twaddle about sisterhood, and the notion, which Roddick traded on, that natural cosmetics could be feminist.
She was always candid that nothing she made could stave off age or simulate gorgeousness, but you could have sensuous fun using it. She carried over that approach - a good time can lead to good works - to her business, and to her social and environmental campaigns.
Roddick was brought up the daughter of Gilda and Donny Perilli, Italian-Jewish immigrants with a cafe in Littlehampton, Sussex. Gilda later divorced Donny and married his cousin, Henry; she waited until Anita's 18th birthday to tell her daughter that Henry was her real father. It didn't worry the girl - she was still an Italian who ate lots of tomatoes.
Roddick went to a convent, then Maude Allen secondary modern school, failed to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama and, after teacher training college in Bath, taught English.
Then a bold move: she travelled, taking jobs in Paris and Geneva to fund herself as far as Africa and the Far East.
At the club Gilda ran back home, Anita was introduced to Gordon Roddick; they had a daughter, Justine, married in Reno, Nevada, in 1970, and wandered - before returning to Littlehampton to run a B&B and restaurant. How unserious their entrepreneurship was - and how far ahead of the times they were - is clear from Gordon's decision to take a gap of two years to ride horseback from Buenos Aires to New York.
His absence was her break. She had Justine, plus baby Samantha, plus a loan of £4,000 - arranged by Gordon because Anita, in her Bob Dylan T-shirt, had failed to convince the bank of her probity. Her premises in Brighton were so derelict that she joked that green became the Body Shop colour to camouflage the mould on the walls.
Roddick's 25 primary products were not so different from those of earlier cosmetic queens; it was the way she sold her Bedouin-recipe moisturiser that was new. She did not propose exotic fantasy: she did promise that the ingredients had not been tested on animals, were not synthetic, and - long before the Fairtrade movement - that they had been sourced directly from the world's ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers. Her lack of packaging was anti-waste - customers could return the plain bottles to be refilled. If she huckstered anything, it was the history of the ingredients and the anthropology of their cultivators.
She sold 50 per cent of the business to a local garage owner to raise money for a second shop, and might not have gone much further than a few more shops, run by friends, had not Gordon ridden back, taken over the finances and suggested franchising branches.
Most franchisees were women, and they, as much as Roddick, made Body Shops unprecedented places: you would go in for brazil-nut conditioner (Roddick trekked to research adornment rituals), and be made breathless, both by the concentrated smells and by the fervour for green issues and aid for the developing world.
Her balance of entrepreneurship and activism seemed even weirder in the mean, greedy 1980s. The Roddicks took the business public in 1984; she later understood that that had been a serious mistake, since its success was thereafter calculated only in terms of profits and growth. Her protests about social change and egalitarian business methods did not seem to square with her new role as a pioneer female entrepreneur.
Of course, there was a reaction. By the 1990s, she was the fourth richest woman in Britain, author of an autobiography, Body and Soul (1991), and a reliable source of quotes on ethical consumption and of finance for pacifist, ecological and human rights causes, among them Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth and the Big Issue. She was routinely derided as being left and green only to promote Body Shop or herself.
In 1992 she successfully sued over a television documentary that claimed she had lied about animal testing; in 1994 Business Ethics magazine challenged her record on green standards and fair trade - and the share price fell. She felt no contradiction in joining anti-globalisation protesters who rocked the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, but they were less sure about the sincerity of an anti-multinationalist who headed a company with 2,000 outlets in 55 countries.
She began to edge away from the business, standing down as chief executive. Then, last year, the Roddicks outraged the finance pages and users of jojoba cleanser alike when they sold the Body Shop to L'Oréal for £625 million (€900 million), of which they received £118 million. That she intended to give it away, plus her own £50 million or so, through the charitable Roddick Foundation, did not silence accusations of betrayal, though she was confident she could persuade L'Oréal to adopt her sort of ingredients.
But she was also relieved to be rid of the old monster, possibly because she had been diagnosed in 2004 with hepatitis C, contracted through a transfusion during Samantha's birth in 1971. It gave her cirrhosis of the liver, an appointment with a transplant, a sudden urgency about life and another chance to campaign - this time against ignorance of the disease. She was awarded the OBE in 1988 and made a dame in 2003. Gordon, Justine and Samantha survive her.
Anita Roddick: born October 23rd, 1942; died September 10th, 2007