From Miss World to Parliament: Beauty, Power, and Reinvention with Lisa Hanna — E. 869

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Aging Intelligently: Lisa Hanna on Beauty, Leadership, and Changing the Language Around Aging

For decades, the beauty industry has taught women to approach aging as something to correct, reverse, or fight. But what happens when we stop treating the passage of time as a problem and begin asking what our skin actually needs to remain healthy, resilient, and radiant? In this episode of Skin Anarchy, Dr. Ekta Yadav sits down with former Miss World, longtime Jamaican political leader, activist, and beauty entrepreneur Lisa Hanna for a conversation that moves far beyond skincare. From navigating nearly two decades in politics after first entering the public eye through beauty to challenging ageism and building Lisa Hanna Beauty, Hanna shares why her newest chapter is centered on a different philosophy: aging intelligently.

From Miss World to the Political Battlefield

Hanna describes herself as an “accidental beauty queen.” Growing up, she was far more interested in leadership, activism, and community work than pageantry. At 17, after entering Miss Jamaica largely at her mother’s encouragement, she won — and shortly afterward went on to win Miss World in South Africa during an extraordinary moment in the country’s history as apartheid was ending.

Rather than being captivated solely by the pageant itself, Hanna found herself fascinated by the political and social transformation unfolding around her. She would speak with hotel workers, guards, and local people to understand what they were experiencing, reflecting an instinct toward public service that would ultimately shape the next several decades of her life.

After completing two degrees and working internationally in project management, Hanna entered Jamaican politics in her early thirties. She became a member of parliament, served as a cabinet minister, and spent nearly 20 years in politics before retiring last year.

That transition wasn’t about abandoning leadership. For Hanna, it reflected another philosophy she has carried throughout her life: leadership also means knowing when to create room for the generation coming behind you.

What Happens When Beauty Enters a Room Before You Do

Hanna’s transition from Miss World to parliament exposed another reality: women are often judged visually before anyone hears what they have to say.

When she first entered parliament, Hanna recalls being treated as a novelty — the beauty queen whose intelligence and political ability were immediately questioned. She was heckled and underestimated, but that perception changed quickly once her colleagues encountered both her intellectual rigor and her willingness to stand her ground.

Over nearly two decades, however, scrutiny of her appearance never completely disappeared. Her clothing became the subject of parliamentary discussions. A photograph of her in a swimsuit sparked national debate. As she grew older, that scrutiny took on another dimension: age.

Hanna’s experience illustrates how beauty can become both an advantage and a mechanism through which women are diminished. The expectations shift with age, but the scrutiny remains.

Rather than allowing those expectations to dictate how she saw herself, Hanna developed a philosophy that would eventually become foundational to her beauty brand: time should add to a woman, not diminish her.

Why the Language of Anti-Aging Matters

One of the most compelling ideas in the conversation centers on the language beauty has historically used around aging.

Hanna rejects the idea that the evidence of time is inherently something that needs to be corrected. We expect experience to make us more knowledgeable in nearly every other area of life. We seek experienced physicians, experienced leaders, and wisdom from older generations. Yet beauty has traditionally communicated aging as a process of loss.

Language, Hanna argues, is never neutral.

When women repeatedly hear words like reverse, correct, and fight associated with their faces and bodies, the implication is that aging itself represents failure.

Her alternative is what she calls aging intelligently: understanding how the skin changes, supporting what it needs at each stage, and maintaining its function without approaching it as an enemy.

At the center of that philosophy is something deceptively simple: skin is an organ. Rather than continually attacking it with increasingly aggressive interventions, Hanna believes skincare should work in harmony with its biology.

Creating Skincare for the Skin She Actually Had

Hanna’s interest in developing skincare grew out of her own changing relationship with her skin.

Years spent working outdoors as a member of parliament, combined with the natural changes that came with age, altered what her skin could tolerate. Ingredients and aggressive active-heavy routines that had once been promoted as essential no longer worked for her. Retinoids, alpha hydroxy acids, and high concentrations of vitamin C could become difficult to tolerate.

At the same time, she found herself shopping across multiple brands to assemble a routine that met her needs.

For someone balancing an extraordinarily demanding career, that approach didn’t feel practical. She wanted skincare that could provide efficacy, hydration, sensoriality, and luxury without requiring women to continually overwhelm their skin.

That frustration became the starting point for Lisa Hanna Beauty.

Bringing Science and Luxury Back Together

To develop the line, Hanna turned to Italy, where she found a laboratory exploring technologies and ingredients that aligned with her philosophy of supporting skin rather than aggressively disrupting it.

The development process ultimately took three years.

Hanna describes working with technologies including mastic resin, protected vitamin C, peptides, biolipids, and botanical-derived components selected to support the skin while maintaining a sophisticated sensorial experience. She was particularly interested in creating formulas that the skin could readily recognize and interact with rather than products that simply sat heavily on its surface.

But scientific performance was only part of the equation.

Hanna was equally adamant that effective skincare should still feel luxurious. The weight of the glass bottle, the appearance of the packaging, the fragrance, and the experience of displaying and using the products all mattered.

For her, luxury and science aren’t opposing ideas. A woman spending her hard-earned money should receive both.

Luxury Shouldn’t Belong to One Type of Woman

Building a luxury beauty company also forced Hanna to confront another assumption deeply embedded within the Western beauty industry.

Early in development, she was repeatedly encouraged to create a brand specifically “for people of color.” Hanna rejected the idea.

Her goal was to formulate skincare across skin tones and skin types — not to build a luxury brand that could only exist within a racialized category. As a woman of Lebanese, Black, and Chinese heritage from Jamaica, Hanna has experienced how differently identity is interpreted depending on where in the world she happens to be.

That perspective shaped the brand’s inclusivity.

She wanted consumers to see women across ethnicities using the products without interpreting any one image as evidence that the formula belonged exclusively to that group.

For Hanna, changing beauty requires changing what consumers have been taught to see. The industry may not need endless new ingredients as much as it needs the courage to dismantle old assumptions about who gets to represent luxury, aging, aspiration, and beauty.

Building a Routine Around Resilience, Not Reversal

The Lisa Hanna Beauty collection was intentionally designed as a complete system rather than a series of disconnected trend-driven launches.

Hanna wanted women to have one destination where they could build a practical ritual around what their skin actually needed. Hydration became particularly important because skin can become increasingly dehydrated with age — even when it appears oily or is covered with occlusive products.

The collection therefore spans cleansing, hydration, serums, moisturization, eye care, face and body radiance, and targeted discoloration care. Each product has a specific role, but the larger philosophy remains consistent: support the skin without unnecessarily overwhelming it.

Her approach to hyperpigmentation was especially personal. Hanna recalls visiting bleaching factories and witnessing the aggressive chemicals some women were using in an attempt to address discoloration. Rather than approaching pigmentation through another harsh treatment, she wanted to develop something practical and targeted that could address areas including the face, underarms, bikini line, body, and visible marks while maintaining hydration.

Ultimately, Hanna says the question guiding the collection was never, How do I make my skin younger?

It was: How do I work with the skin I have today to make it more resilient, radiant, stronger, and more effective?

Beauty as Activism

Despite leaving formal political office, Hanna hasn’t left activism behind.

Five percent of Lisa Hanna Beauty’s proceeds are directed toward supporting women and children with neurodivergence, particularly in Jamaica. Hanna’s commitment is rooted in both her experience in public service and her own family.

During her time as Minister of Youth and Culture, she witnessed children with conditions including ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia being misunderstood by systems unequipped to recognize or support their needs. With extremely limited access to child psychiatric resources in Jamaica, she saw firsthand how undiagnosed neurodivergence could shape a child’s education, behavior, opportunities, and future.

Her own son has ADHD, giving the issue another deeply personal dimension.

For Hanna, the beauty company therefore represents more than another professional reinvention. It is a vehicle through which her decades of activism can continue.

Skincare can transform skin, but she wants the business built around it to transform lives as well.

Skin Reflects How We Live

Perhaps the simplest idea in the conversation is also the one that best summarizes Hanna’s philosophy: skin reflects how we live.

Skincare cannot exist completely separately from health. Just as people now pay closer attention to movement, muscle mass, nutrition, sleep, and other components of longevity, Hanna believes skin deserves the same intentional care.

That doesn’t mean obsessing over every line or trying to erase evidence that time has passed.

There is an important difference between caring for the skin and believing the skin needs to be corrected.

Hanna encourages younger generations in particular to resist the temptation to continually add more products, more aggressive ingredients, and more interventions simply because they’re available. Instead, understand your skin, protect it from unnecessary damage, identify what actually works, and remain consistent.

The goal isn’t younger skin at any cost. It’s healthier skin for the life you’re actually living.

Looking Ahead

Lisa Hanna has spent much of her life moving through spaces where other people attempted to define her before she could define herself: beauty queen, politician, woman in power, woman of color, woman getting older.

Her newest chapter challenges those categories rather than accepting another one.

Through Lisa Hanna Beauty, she’s bringing together the seemingly disparate pieces of her life — beauty, science, politics, activism, leadership, and lived experience — around a larger argument about what beauty can represent.

Aging doesn’t have to be a battle against time. Luxury doesn’t belong to one demographic. Science doesn’t have to come at the expense of sensoriality. And caring about how you look doesn’t make the work superficial.

Listen to the full episode of Skin Anarchy to hear Lisa Hanna discuss her journey from Miss World to nearly two decades in Jamaican politics, the ageism women continue to face, the philosophy behind Lisa Hanna Beauty, and why the future of skincare may begin with learning to work with our skin rather than fight against it.

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