Skincare influencer Hirons beats Bolton to charts number one

Blogger and influencer Caroline Hirons' Skincare (HQ) shifted just under 33,000 copies through Nielsen BookScan in its first week on sale to become just the second fashion and beauty title to claim the UK's Official Top 50 number one⁠—and the first for over 18 years.

Hirons, a 50-year-old Liverpudlian businesswoman and mother of four, is frequently cited as one of the most powerful people in the beauty industry, having gained millions of followers on her blog and social media platforms for her honest, straightforward advice and no-nonsense tutorials. The only other fashion title to claim the overall top spot since accurate records began was Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall's What Not to Wear (Weidenfeld) which topped the charts for two weeks in November 2002. Hirons has also given HarperCollins division HQ its first ever overall top spot. 

Skincare beat the other big new release of the week, John' Bolton's The Room Where it Happened (Simon & Schuster), the Donald Trump administration exposé by the 45th US president's former national security advisor. Bolton's memoir shifted 18,544 units last week to claim the runner-up position, a return no doubt boosted by the publicity from the White House unsuccessfully trying to block publication of the book in the US and the president's almost inevitable vitriolic tweets against his former aide. The Hirons and Bolton titles ended the historic two-week run for Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race (Bloomsbury) which dropped to third place. Still, Eddo-Lodge does retain the Paperback Non-Fiction number one for the fourth week in a row and the total of 18,363 copies sold is her second-best ever weekly haul.  

While the overall market was not as buoyant as the previous week when many bricks and mortar shops reopened in England, there was an excellent return of £28.4m. That does represent a 14% drop from the return to trading week, but it is 9.2% up on the same week in 2019. In fact, it is the strongest last week of June return for physical book sales in 13 years. 

It has been a good week for Bernadine Evaristo, who on Monday (29th June) won the British Book Awards for both Novel and Author of the Year, and whose Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton) has retained the Mass Market Fiction number one for the second seven-day period in a row and three out of the past four weeks. Karin Slaughter's The Silent Wife (HarperCollins) shifted 5,497 in its first week on sale to earn her a 12th Original Fiction top spot, displacing her HC stablemate Fern Britton, whose Daughters of Cornwall slips to second on 5,410 units, despite increasing its sales week on week by 20%.  David Walliams and Tony Ross' Slime (HarperCollins Children's) earned an 11th non-consecutive Children's number one, shifting 7,301 copies.