The bossy chatterbox who always forgot her food tech.
Ask my old teachers and they'll tell you I was the bossy chatterbox kid who couldn't sit still, talked over everyone, and somehow never once had her Food Tech or PE kit on the right day. That was the story for years. Not "she has ADHD and needs a different kind of structure." Just "disorganised", "a lot", "needs to concentrate more." Nobody was looking for a reason. I certainly wasn't. Now I run a beauty company. The distance between those two sentences is basically my whole adult life.
Why the "Great ADHD Myth" argument doesn't land for me
Channel 4's The Great ADHD Myth? has reopened the argument about whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental condition or something closer to a social label, and it's had real pushback: ADHD UK and the Royal College of Psychiatrists have both publicly challenged how the documentary frames the evidence. I'm not a clinician and this post isn't a rebuttal of the science. But I can tell you what changed the day I actually understood my own brain: nothing about me was different. What was different was that things that used to feel like personal failure, forgetting, fidgeting, needing to talk something out loud to think about it, finally had an explanation that wasn't "try harder." That's not a myth. That's just what a correct diagnosis does.
What this has to do with makeup
It's not a stretch, it's the reason sensory-friendly beauty matters to me at all. The British Beauty Council's DEI report found that nearly 20% of the beauty workforce identifies as neurodivergent, four percentage points above the national average. This industry isn't short of neurodivergent people. It's short of products built with them in mind. A lot of what gets filed under "sensory issues" in beauty conversations, strong fragrance, fiddly packaging, textures that feel wrong, overwhelming counters, isn't just an autism or sensory-processing conversation. ADHD brains can find the same things genuinely harder to tolerate: the wrong texture is a full stop, not a minor annoyance, and packaging that needs three steps of fine motor patience before you've even started your makeup is a reason not to bother.
That's part of why the Makeup Therapy™ Palette is built the way it is: a clear, uncluttered shade layout instead of a wall of near-identical pans, a magnetised cover that shuts satisfyingly instead of one that never quite closes, and a formula chosen so you're not fighting the product to get a good result on a day when your patience is already spent. None of that is marketed as a medical feature. It's just good design, the same as anything else here. But if you're the person who used to give up on a makeup routine because it took too much working memory to get through, it's the whole difference.
The point I actually want to make
I don't need a documentary to tell me whether my ADHD is real. I need beauty brands to stop treating "sensory friendly" as a niche add-on for a small audience and start treating it as what it actually is: a genuinely large group of people whose brains and senses work differently, who buy makeup, and who are currently being designed for as an afterthought, if at all. From bossy chatterbox to beauty CEO, the throughline for me has always been the same: give people the right conditions and they don't need fixing. They just need someone to stop assuming the standard version was ever the only one that works.
