Anita Roddick, cosmetics’ Queen of Green, dies at 64

“Businesses have the power to do good,” Roddick wrote on the Web site of the company, which was bought by the French company L’Oreal Group last year for $1.14 billion.

The Body Shop opposed animal testing and tried to encourage Third World development by purchasing materials from small communities in poorer countries. It founded a human rights award and invested in a wind farm in Wales as part of its campaign to promote renewable energy.

“Before Body Shop you could only find cruelty-free products in hippie shops — now they are everywhere,” said People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals vice president Dan Mathews, who worked with Roddick on campaigns in the 1980s, when Body Shop became a global brand.

The company grew into a global phenomenon with nearly 2,000 stores in 50 countries but Roddick, the daughter of Italian immigrants, said she opened her first outlet in 1976 in Brighton, southern England, with only modest hopes.

“I started the Body Shop simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas,” she wrote. “I had no training or experience …”

Roddick who died at a hospital in Chichester, had revealed in February that she contracted hepatitis C through a blood transfusion while giving birth to a daughter in 1971.