There can’t be another beauty therapist whose career trajectory begins in a disabled toilet and ends in a royal palace, but Deborah Mitchell is a true one-off. A celebrity facialist, beauty brand founder and now double royal warrant holder, she’s gone from sleepy Shropshire (her first ‘treatment room’ was a converted loo in Telford’s Holiday Inn) to mixing in elite society.
Yet despite this starry ascent, the warm, glamorous 60-year-old assures GH she’s still just the same person, still based with her loyal flagship salon staff in the quiet market town of Shifnal, ‘and I treat all my clients exactly the same, whoever they are,’ she adds.
Well, apart from having to curtsy to some before she’s allowed to begin their facial.
Deborah has been Queen Camilla’s skin guru for the past 20 years, and she’s thrilled to pay her royal respects. ‘I love to curtsy to her, because it’s so special,’ she says. ‘If there’s one person I feel is even better than a friend, it’s her. She’s my favourite person.’
Helping the Queen to look and feel her best is something Deborah relishes. ‘I've loved watching her get younger as I've got older,’ she says. ‘Sometimes she surprises me how good she looks when I see her. She does all this work, she shouldn't look so refreshed before I even start a treatment!’
Deborah’s route into royal society began after her now-iconic Age Defiance Cream fell into the hands of a different type of posh: Victoria Beckham. Word had been spreading for years about Deborah’s magic touch since Duran Duran began using her services, introduced via the wife of guitarist Andy Taylor who lived in Shropshire too. ‘I’d go to their house, and see all these famous people like George Michael jamming there. My treatment was so special because I knew how to manipulate the face and make it look younger.’
At the same time, Deborah was formulating her own skincare products, ‘toddling off to the pharmacy’ and blending bespoke formulas ahead of clients’ facials. She refined her recipes over time, eventually leading to her own Heaven Skincare brand and the cream slipped to Victoria Beckham by her makeup artist. (‘It stops acne in two seconds flat,’ as Deborah puts it.) Posh began singing its praises to the press, ‘and that was the start of a long journey of lovely things’, including a phone call from Clarence House.
‘At first, I thought it was Clarins calling!’ Deborah laughs. ‘I was very excited when they asked if I would do a treatment on Camilla Parker-Bowles, as she was then. When I did that first treatment, as soon as I touched her, it was the strangest feeling. I felt like I was home. I get that same feeling every time I do a treatment on her. It’s a very special connection.’
Today, both her skincare and treatments are loved by royals, she says, proudly stressing the plural. There are limits to how much she can say (‘I could be sent to the Tower,’ she jokes), but she confirms that the Princess of Wales did, indeed, use her Silver Bee Venom mask ahead of the royal wedding.
Heaven Skincare Silver Bee Venom Mask
‘It smooths the skin by tricking your body into thinking it’s been stung. If you have a static wrinkle that's there all the time, Botox will not work, but my bee venom will work. The Queen was actually one of the first people who tried it. She gave it to Kate, and yes, I have met her, although I can’t say anything else. But I was highly honoured… and I am still highly honoured.’
In 2024, Deborah was given a royal warrant from the Queen for both Heaven’s products and treatments, something which the royal family pays for just like any other customer. ‘There are no freebies with royal warrants,’ Deborah reveals. ‘But I did give the Queen my Gold Bee Venom for a Christmas present. That’s a really special treatment, and we’re running out of that particular venom, so I’ll save another one for her birthday.’
The Queen might want to keep a close eye on that rare jar, because it seems there’s a fellow Heaven devotee very close to home. ‘I could have a Royal Warrant from the King too, but the Queen is so special to me that her warrant is all I ever wanted,’ she says. ‘It’s an incredible honour. She was over the moon for me that she could do that for me.’
Deborah’s latest therapy for the Queen is her new Eternal Youth facial, featuring Heaven’s Eternal Natural Bio-Identical Hormone Cream, a ‘game-changing’ product that Deborah created to support skin before, during and after the menopause. It’s a face cream also used by Queen Camilla at home, and one that ‘calms the mind as well as making skin look younger,’ says Deborah.
Heaven Skincare Eternal Cream
‘I’m striving for perfection all the time,’ she adds. ‘The new treatment is a completely different way of doing a facial. It releases all the fascia on the face in a way that totally relaxes the client. They feel great after it, and their skin goes tighter, smoother. If people are having hormonal or stress issues, this facial is like having a holiday within themselves.’
It’s a deeply personal type of beauty therapy, and one that requires the utmost discretion. ‘I see a lot of very famous people but I don’t name names without permission,’ Deborah says. ‘But I’m not a very ‘celebrity’ person. I don’t feel nervous.’ Even those early royal bookings - ‘so secret I couldn’t even tell my mum for years’ - didn’t faze her.
‘Because I do healing as a person, I do have this inner belief that wherever I am is where I'm supposed to be,’ she says. ‘My clients get beautiful results, they feel that inner and outer body experience. I might be nervous in social circumstances, but with my treatments, I know I am the best there is.’
Deborah’s rules as a beauty boss
The facialist shares how she made it to the top
Learn all you can. ‘I trained not just as a beauty therapist but also to make skincare. I was very lucky. Being an entrepreneur, I always think outside the box, and being dyslexic probably gives me an extra edge. I was always working at nights and on weekends doing extra treatments so I could buy ingredients and make products to help improve people’s skin.'
Invest whatever time and money you have. ‘The first thing I bought when I started doing treatments was a pack of nail extensions for a pound. You could get so many sets of nail extensions out of this one pack. You grow from small things. I always had an inner belief that I was going to go places, but I was also working seven days a week, and that’s how I attracted people like Duran Duran.'
Do what you believe in. ‘I’ve always had this belief in organic ingredients. That’s become the DNA of my brand. I handed the customer the skincare I made for them, and next time I saw them, they needed me, because they loved the skincare.'
Grow from setbacks ‘I will always have contracts for everything now. I lost all my first formulas to a company because I didn’t. I cried for days. But from that bad thing came something better. My original formula of Age Defiance was a nice moisturiser but not superb. So I did lots of research and asked an expert, 'What's the best ingredient ever in the world?' They said, "There's an ingredient called DSH. Nobody will use it because it's so expensive." I said, "I'll have it." So I spent all my money on that ingredient, made it the base of a new Age Defiance and it's fantastic. If I hadn't had that product, Victoria Beckham would never have phoned me to say it was amazing, and I wouldn't be where I am today.’
Cherish your staff. ‘We now do something called Hormonal Holidays. So if one of my staff members has period pains, for instance, we ask them if they want to go into a room, get a hot water bottle, and just stay in there. Or they can go home and they can still get paid. We check that staff are okay at all times. If they can't cope with a foggy brain because they're menopausal, we give them a rest so that they can cope. As soon as you give them that rest, their stress level clears, and so they'll go above and beyond for us.'
