Some resets are a lipstick. Some are a whole life. Both count.

What 30 years of watching Trinny Woodall taught me about endurance, being underestimated, and the next reset coming for all of us.

There’s a moment most women I know hit at least once a day. It’s small. A glance in a window. A breath at the bottom of the stairs. A pause in the loo at work before walking back into the room. We call it nothing. It’s actually everything. It’s a reset.

Sometimes the reset is bigger. You leave the job. You leave the relationship. You change your hair. You change your mind. You stop apologising for the way you actually want to spend your one wild life.

I’ve done a lot of both lately.

And last week, I got to host an event at the Reset Cafe with someone who has been quietly teaching me how to do both for the better part of three decades. The launch of Trinny London’s new Reset Lip Kit. With the Glitterati in the room. (That’s what I call Glittersphere members. They earned it.)

Let me rewind.

30 years of Trinny

The first time Trinny taught me anything I was a teenager watching What Not To Wear. The brutal, brilliant, honest advice on dressing yourself in a way that made you walk taller. It wasn’t really about the clothes. It was about giving women back the confidence the world had quietly trained out of them. Most of what I know about dressing for the version of yourself you want to be, I learned watching her and Susannah pull strangers apart and put them back together in BBC primetime.

Then came the next era. Roughly a decade ago, she started showing up in her dressing room on Instagram. Talking through beauty product ingredients. The actual science. What layered with what, what was a marketing claim, what was a real one. Zara hauls where she’d build outfits in front of you that you’d never have put together yourself and now wanted desperately. She was building a point of view in public, with absolute conviction, before “personal brand” was a thing anyone had a name for.

What I didn’t know at the time was that she was also, quietly, building Trinny London.

Her own reset

She started the business at 53, after her own resets. Big ones. Hard ones. Public ones. To back herself she rented out her house and downsized her life so the money would go where her conviction had to.

Then came the investor part. The story she tells openly. Repeatedly rejected. Mansplained to about her own products by men who had never used a lipstick in their lives. Told there was no market in women over 40.

There was no market in women over 40.

Sit with that for a second.

She raised, eventually, from close friends and women who believed her. Today Trinny London is worth over £200 million. A million customers around the world. A loved beauty brand. Still founder-run. Still her.

Women receive 2% of venture capital. Two. We bootstrap or we get the call where a man explains that our idea would be brilliant if it were for him. So we get on with it anyway. Trinny did. I’m doing it now. Bootstrapping Glittersphere. Raising for HERA. Knowing first hand the gap between what we know is true and what the room will fund.

I’m 53. The same age Trinny was when she started Trinny London. The math is not lost on me.

That’s the context for everything that came next.

The dinner

The moment Trinny and I actually clicked was at a dinner a few months ago. Me, Trinny, her brilliant CMO Michelle Marks, and the guest speaker that night, Monica Lewinsky.

The kind where you go home and stare at the ceiling for a bit afterwards. The kind that reroutes you.

What I realised over the course of that dinner is how much Trinny and I are aligned. Not just on ambition or pace. On the harder stuff. Being single in midlife. Toughing things out. Giving compliments to other women like our lives depend on it. And, this is the bit that surprised me most, on AI.

Trinny gets it. Properly gets it. Not “AI is having a moment” gets it. Not “we’re exploring AI” gets it. She uses it. She understands what it can do for women, for builders, for anyone trying to make something good in the time they’ve got.

So when the call came about co-hosting a Glittersphere event for the launch of the Reset Lip Kit, the answer was yes before the sentence finished.

Why a lipstick is the perfect metaphor

Glittersphere is built on the idea that women get to reset. Big resets. Small resets. The daily ones nobody notices.

This is the privilege most of us were told didn’t exist. We got handed one ladder and one lane and a polite smile if we asked about anything else. I have spent my entire adult life rebelling against that. Quietly at first. Loudly now.

A reset is not failure. A reset is the realisation that the thing you were doing is not the thing you are for.

The Reset Lip Kit is the literal version. You put it on. You look in the mirror. You feel slightly more like yourself. You walk back into the room.

The Glittersphere version is the same thing, scaled up. A career reset. A confidence reset. A “what am I actually doing with my time” reset.

The room and the line

The Reset Cafe was packed with Glitterati and their friends. Trinny’s team mirror her energy exactly. Warm. Sharp. Kind. Sparkly. The kind of team you can only build if you actually mean it about women.

If I could have bottled the energy in that room, none of us would need to work again.

A note on the lipstick itself. I’m picky. I’ve tested most of what’s going. The colour Trinny put me in is not a colour I would have picked. And it’s now one of the best lipsticks I own. The packaging is beautiful. The product is good for your skin. The mental load of getting ready is genuinely lower because of her skincare and makeup system. That’s not a sponsored line. I just rate it.

But the line I keep coming back to from that night wasn’t from the mic. It was something she said in conversation.

“Endurance is as important as conviction.”

Conviction gets you started. Endurance is what builds the £200 million business. Endurance is what gets you through the third investor meeting where a man explains your own product back to you. Endurance is what makes you say yes to the reset when the timing is wrong, the money is wrong, the room hasn’t caught up yet.

Being underestimated, Trinny has taught me, is your superpower. It’s the cover you operate under while you build the thing they refused to back. From the brutal-brilliant advice on the telly to the sequins-in-the-daytime philosophy to the £200M company, she’s shown me how to keep getting back up and put on something bolder.

The next reset

And then there’s the reset that’s coming for all of us, whether we’re ready or not.

AI is not a tool. AI is the next reset.

I’ve called it the washing machine of our era and I stand by it. The time it gives back to women is real. The mental load it lifts is real. But the bigger story isn’t the time saved. The bigger story is cognitive extension. The access to skills and tools and combinations we’ve never had before in human history. Women who couldn’t afford a designer, a strategist, a researcher, a lawyer, a content team, now have all of them on a laptop on the kitchen table.

This is a reset of who gets to build. Who gets to be visible. Who gets to be chosen.

AI won’t make any of us a master. That’s not the point. It gives us the confidence and the leverage to do things we’ve been quietly shut out of, talked down to about, told weren’t for us. It lets us explore our own cognitive depth and curiosity without asking permission. It puts the room inside our laptop.

It is also not without its problems. The environmental cost is real. The regulation is messy. The bias in the training is something we have to keep arguing about.

Which is exactly why women have to be in the rooms where the decisions get made.

We cannot change something we are not in. We cannot be a fair judge of something if we are working from what we’ve been handed, rather than what we have gone and learned ourselves.

Opting out of AI is not neutral. It’s a decision to be optimised away.

Let’s do this together

I’ve just launched a free 30-day AI challenge. From AI anxious to AI confident in 30 days. Little prompts, little nudges, daily challenges that build the habit, the curiosity, the muscle. By the end of the 30 days you’ll have built an agent so you can see exactly what’s possible when AI is tailored to what you need.

Trinny is making women feel better through what they put on their skin and their lips. I’m making women feel better through visibility and AI fluency.

Two ways into the same room.

One last thing

Trinny has been on my screen, quietly teaching me, since I was a teenager. Now she’s a friend, a peer, an honorary member of the Glitterati, and one of the people whose confidence in me over the last few months has been everything. Funny how the people you grew up watching can become the people you build alongside.

If you’ve been waiting for a sign that it’s time to reset, take this.

Reset the small thing. Or the big one. Or both.

Throw the sequins on. Put the lipstick on. Open the laptop. Pick the new ladder. Build the agent. Walk into the room.

It’s time, ladies. We need to go.

I’ll see you in there.

Nishma x

Follow along for the free 30-day AI challenge on LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. The toolkit I share (the 28 tools I actually use out of the 220+ I’ve tested) lives here.

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