Meet the skincare guru to the stars, Dr Barbara Sturm

The first time Oprah Winfrey tried Dr Barbara Sturm’s skincare products, in 2019, she says she immediately rang up her friend Stella McCartney, who had sent them to her, and said: “What is this? What is this?” Next she got in touch with Sturm herself. “I want to invest in your company,” she told the German skincare guru. It was the first time Winfrey had done anything like that.

As endorsements go it doesn’t get much better than that, but it pretty much sums up the world of Barbara Sturm — celebrities fangirling over her the world over, including Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham to mention just two.

You remind me of Elizabeth Zott — the feisty heroine of Bonnie Garmus’s bestselling novel and subsequent TV series, Lessons in Chemistry — I tell Sturm when we meet in her huge penthouse suite at the Corinthia hotel, in Whitehall, London, whose spa she works in partnership with. “Yes, this is my story!” the 52-year-old blue-eyed blonde replies, delighted I’ve compared her to the fictional lab assistant whose scientific brilliance is undermined by fusty, misogynistic doctors. “It was a very educational series — how to gain knowledge and power and be a feminist.”

Sturm sits back and ruffles her pixie cut, the lines and creases of age visible on her glowing complexion. She will later admit to having Botox and her lips done. “You can get such a lift from it,” she says. “It’s about the way you do it, you can’t tell I’ve had anything done.”

Left: T-shirt, £110, Toteme. Jacket, £7,200, trousers, £2,800, and brooch, £2,200, Schiaparelli. Shoes, £750, Jimmy Choo. Diamond necklace and pendant, POA, and Ball n Chain necklace, £19,900, Jessica McCormack. Right: top, £1,120, and denim shirt, £2,750, Gucci. Earrings, £2,490, Annoushka. Panthère de Cartier watch, £25,400, Cartier. Hex diamond ring, £23,000, Jessica McCormack. Bracelets, Barbara’s own

SOPHIE GREEN

The feisty entrepreneur, who originally qualified as an orthopaedic doctor and worked as a lab assistant during her university years, is dressed in a short, black Chanel lederhosen-style romper suit (“I am a boy at heart, I love shorts”), a silver Celine T-shirt and Celine wellington boots; her arms are covered in at least ten diamond and gold bracelets.

In just over ten years she has created one of the most widely recognised global beauty brands, including opening spas across America, Germany and in London. Early this year the Spanish fashion, beauty and fragrance conglomerate Puig, which owns Charlotte Tilbury, Byredo and Christian Louboutin, acquired a majority stake for a rumoured £180 million.

Sturm is far from your typical doctor. A standard Monday night for the mum of two is dinner with Diane Kruger and Justin Theroux, and she hosts weekly “intimate” soirées in LA, London and New York for friends of the brand such as Sabrina Elba, Camille Charrière, Kathy Hilton and Derek Blasberg, among others.

But hers had not been an overnight success story, not least because of her early years growing up in communist-era East Germany (her family moved to Düsseldorf when she was 11). She has also had to fight naysayers who have questioned her authenticity as a doctor (she is certified, I checked the German medical registry), that she is not a dermatologist (true) and that her products are not verified by clinical trials (again true, more of which later).

Left: sports bra, £54, and leggings, £70, Varley. Right: t-shirt, £110, Toteme. Jacket, £7,200, denim trousers, £2,800, and brooch, £2,200, Schiaparelli. Diamond necklace and diamond pendant, POA, and Ball n Chain necklace, £19,900, Jessica McCormack

SOPHIE GREEN

While Sturm has won over the Hollywood elite, she has faced a loud and clear backlash from top skincare-industry experts for pooh-poohing some of today’s most popular skincare ingredients such as retinol. “They cause inflammation and are therefore ageing,” she says. “Anything that strips the skin barrier causes inflammation and, as a result, is ageing.” Her most controversial opinion surrounds the use of SPF. Why is she so against it, particularly as the beauty industry and dermatologists, who strongly oppose her view, are telling us to use it 24/7? “There have been studies showing that sunscreen is causing a lot of skin cancer,” she says. “I’m not saying if you’re on the beach in Ibiza you shouldn’t use it. But not daily. We need sun for vitamin D and our mental health.”

Is she like Elizabeth Zott, simply a feisty and misunderstood iconoclast, or is there more to her story?

“I knew from the age of four I wanted to be a doctor,” she says, stroking her tanned bare legs absent-mindedly. She describes her young self as bookish and curious, a late developer who never sat still but always applied herself to her studies. She briefly considered becoming a professional skier but her medical calling was stronger. While at university she worked as a lab assistant in an orthopaedic hospital, trialling a pioneering joint inflammation treatment in which proteins extracted from the patient’s blood were reinjected into affected areas, such as knees or shoulders, with groundbreaking results.

Clockwise from top left: Barbara Sturm with Sabrina Elba; Sturm with Katie Holmes; Paris Jackson, Paris Hilton and Nicky Rothschild; and Oprah Winfrey

GETTY IMAGES, NEIL RASMUS/BFA, OWEN KOLASINSKI/BFA

Her work at the lab piqued her interest —could other areas of the body be treated using the same procedure? She had always suffered from acne and spent a fortune trying every product with no discernible results. What if she applied the same protocol to her face? “I fixed my skin overnight,” Sturm says.

The procedure, which became known as the PRP (platelet-rich plasma) or vampire facial, is now ubiquitous in beauty salons all over the world. Next she decided to team up with a pharmacist to formulate a cream (similarly mixed with the client’s extracted blood proteins), which she named MC1. “My patients loved it and I got a lot of attention from the press,” she says. “Things went crazy after that. The most prominent people were asking to see me. My colleagues did not like it.” She says she had to leave the practice: “It was just like Lessons in Chemistry.”

Undeterred, she opened her own clinic in Düsseldorf in 2006 and set about developing a line of blood-free commercial products. At first she turned to medical companies, which tried to sell her their existing formulations repackaged under her name, a common beauty industry practice known as “white labelling”. “I said no, I will do it all from scratch,” she says. The result, which she launched in 2014, was Dr Barbara Sturm Molecular Cosmetics, her trademark line of anti-inflammatory products, which now includes her Super Anti-Aging serums and moisturisers, and the newly launched Everything Eye Patches, Glow Cream and Super Anti-Aging Dual Serum, as well as hair products and children’s skincare. (Her Baby & Kids Face Cream retails at a casual £40.) Her launch into skincare propitiously coincided with Net-a-Porter’s expansion into selling beauty products. It immediately took her on. “That was a big deal,” she says.

Robe, £225, and pyjama shorts, £135, Ayda. Sapphire earrings, price on application, Jessica McCormack. Diamond ring, £5,667, Anita Ko

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We discuss the crazy cost of over-the-counter creams today, and while hers are by no means cheap (her bespoke MC1 blood cream, only available at her German clinic, comes in at more than £1,000), what does she make of today’s pricing? “The beauty industry is mostly a big marketing tool,” she says. “It’s about getting the right celebrity, the right buzzwords — science is the big one right now. Everyone is talking about science this and science that.”

Is this why she has attracted criticism for not putting her products through clinical trials? “My words were taken out of context,” she says. “I’m against all that consumer perception where you’ll see written ‘90 per cent of customers give this product A+++’, but how do you know how many people tested it? It’s easy to make that statement. A proper clinical trial costs millions.”

The takeaway is unless you can access peer-reviewed trials of a particular product the chances are the statistics are consumerled and unreliable.

Sturm’s life, from the outside, is one of constant industry: endless product launches (her Super Anti-Aging Dual Serum and Glow Cream are the latest in her arsenal), workshops, store and spa openings and appearances with celebrities. It’s a wonder she’s had time for a personal life.

She married first at 23 and had her elder daughter, Charly, 28 (who now works alongside her and is primed to eventually take over the brand, frequently fronting her social media campaigns), but divorced four years later. In 2013 she married the American lawyer Adam Waldman (he represented Johnny Depp during the infamous Amber Heard trial) and they have a daughter, Pepper, ten. They have now split. So is she dating? “No … Men always try to tell you you’re nothing without them. I thought, hang on, I am a doctor, I can feed my kids.”

For the moment she spends most of her time in the high-end Swiss ski resort of Gstaad. “I wanted a lifestyle beyond my work life, it’s what I wanted for my children. It’s a simple and healing life. I walk around in sweats. I train with a ski instructor every day.” Does she consider it home? “For now it’s home,” she replies.

Now that she is wealthy, is she ready to slow down? “I made it, then I forgot I made it, so it’s always next, next, next. I care about results, I care about my patients. If you don’t love my products I’m personally offended,” she says with a final steely but amused look.
The new Dr Barbara Sturm Super Anti-Aging Dual Serum, £340, is available now, drsturm.com

Hair: Wilson Fork at Eighteen Management. Make-up: Irina Cajvaneanu at Caren Agency using Dr Barbara Sturm. Thanks to Corinthia London, corinthia.com