Kate Shapland had spent twenty-five years as a beauty journalist by the time she ran out of patience with her own industry, and specifically with the way it talked about cellulite, a subject it had somehow managed to make both shameful and unsolvable at the same time. She had tried everything the market offered and met every expert worth meeting, and she had reached an unavoidable conclusion, which was that the products that looked beautiful did nothing while the ones that did something looked like they belonged in a hospital.
Being one of the women the industry was so busy making feel bad, she decided she was better placed than almost anyone to fix it. In 2013 she launched Legology, which remains the only beauty brand in the world devoted entirely to legs.
She did not rush it. She spent years developing the formulas with a French chemist and a massage therapist, working towards products that promote the lymph and ease the trapped fluid that leaves legs feeling heavy, rather than promising to erase cellulite overnight in the way she had spent her whole career rolling her eyes at. The result performs as well as it looks, which was the entire point, because Kate flatly refused to accept that a woman should have to choose between the two.
There is a particular kind of authority that comes from someone who has watched an industry up close for decades and then decided to do it better, and that authority is exactly what Legology carries. It belongs on Women's Work because it is expertise turned into something real and useful, made by a woman who knew precisely what was missing and went and built it herself.