Ta-dah! Time for the VH Awards (from Victoria Health)
This is a moment we look forward to each year, when our beauty sleuth friend and Victoria Health co-founder (with Shabir Daya) Gill Sinclair unveils the winners in the VH Awards. These are based in part on what has achieved bestseller status on that very respected health and beauty website (and is thereby beloved of customers), and partly on Gill’s own industry insights into what makes an honest, trustworthy and straight up GREAT product – often from small brands.
Like us, Gill is a champion of start-up beauty and wellbeing brands, many of whom can’t afford to enter the so-called ‘big’ beauty awards because the fees are onerous. As Gill explains, ‘To win an award, you mostly need to pay to enter a brand or a product. And then there are the add-ons, which could include supplying a high volume of a chosen product. You are also often promised the sun, moon and stars if you actually win, but that’s a debatable subject, because there is no guarantee that you will achieve that, most especially if you don’t play the game of paying yet another fee to actually watch said awards, virtually or otherwise.
Forgive me, but this sucks. Not only is it corrupt, in my humble opinion, but consumers are duped into thinking that said winning product is the best of the best. Far from it. So what happens to the small, niche brands. Well, they are ignored because they cannot afford to enter that arena, so by virtue of this fact, the struggle to survive is very real for them.’
Many of these smaller brands have achieved great success either on the basis of winning a Beauty Bible Award (and we are grateful to Gill for her appreciation that you can’t ‘buy’ your way into OUR Awards, either), or a VH Award – because both are truly trusted by you, the readers.’
As with all Gill’s weekly newsletters this a rollicking read, with the rollcall of victorious brands including Aromatherapy Associates, Temple Spa and Better You.
So learn all about the winners, below. But before you do, you’ll want to know that currently, we have a prize draw running on our site to win one of five - yes, FIVE! – vouchers to spend on Victoria Health, each worth £350. You could actually buy ALL the site’s award-winners, and still have change.