Businesses were repeatedly denied reopening, with no Government grants or bailouts for the largely female-staffed and female-serving sector. With the UK now officially in recession for the first time in 11 years, experts estimate the beauty sector will shrink by 30 per cent compared to the start of the year.

The London-based facialist Teresa Tarmey has gone from seeing eight clients a day pre-Covid, to only three or four at the time of writing. Part of this, she says, is down to the ‘London effect’, whereby fewer people are travelling into larger cities, impacting many hair and beauty businesses whose customers are now largely working from home. And when the Government made the decision to only allow treatments from the neck down in July, Teresa was forced to diversify her offering.

‘I’m known for my facials,’ she says, ‘but I had to start doing body treatments during that period just to get some money in the till.’ She’s not alone in feeling the pinch.

Earlier this month the National Hair & Beauty Federation released the results of its State of Industry survey, conducted across UK hair and beauty salons and barbershops. Of the 2,000 members who responded, 41 per cent were unsure their business will survive until Christmas, with a third expecting to cut staff in the next three months.

In the beauty sector alone, 74 per cent have had to cut staff hours, and recruitment is at an all-time low. When the Government delayed the planned reopening date for the industry by a further two weeks in August, it meant a great deal financially: Vanita Parti, the founder of Blink Brow Bars, estimated the loss of £60,000 worth of earnings for her business in that fortnight alone.

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The financial and emotional toll the past six months have taken on the beauty industry led us at the Telegraph to launch our Why Can’t I Work campaign, a social-media initiative that saw thousands of women who work in beauty posting pictures of themselves in their full PPE on Instagram, asking the Government why they weren’t Covid-secure enough to go back to work.

The no-work rule made little sense to a sector that has always been at the forefront of safe hygiene measures – most wore PPE years before Covid, with masks, gloves and strict sanitation. ‘The delay in getting the industry reopened despite all the strict hygiene measures in place, and being labelled “high risk”, has caused irreparable damage,’ says Millie Kendall, chief executive of the British Beauty Council, who also cites the staggered approach to reopening the industry as a factor in its ‘pink-collar recession’.

Although the beauty industry has been relatively recession-proof in the past (the ‘lipstick effect’ has meant that if you can’t afford a designer handbag, you might still buy a designer lipstick), the 2020 downturn has affected product sales as well as services. The data analytics company GlobalData estimates that the UK cosmetics sector will drop in value by £1.7 billion in 2020.

Teresa Tarmey worries it will take a long time for her business to get back to a state of normality. Even with the industry reopened, there are concerns that the business might have changed for good.

‘Customers may now get more treatments done at once, but visit their local salon less frequently,’ says Millie Kendall. So will the beauty industry ever recover? ‘I do think it will get back on its feet,’ Millie says, ‘but the way in which it thrives will be changed for ever. Online beauty sales have tripled in lockdown and only time will tell if everything will move more digitally. Where something gets pushed back, it pops up again elsewhere.’

Despite the challenges, she remains positive. ‘We know the beauty industry has shrunk, but we’ve got an opportunity to turn it around. Now, more than ever, people need the feel-good factor they get from beauty treatments.’

Photography by Sarah Brown

Styling by Sonia Haria

Make-up byNikki Wolff using Alleven

• GlobalData PLC