How I started in beauty: Cosmetic dermatologist, founder and author Dr Sam Bunting

Dr Sam Bunting is a UK-trained medical doctor. She opened her own Harley Street clinic in 2010, quickly establishing herself as an authority on common skin concerns and becoming known for her evidence-based, practical approach to skin health. She later launched her eponymous skincare brand, Dr Sam’s, in 2018.

Now, Dr Sam is entering the world of publishing with the launch of her first book, FLAWLESS: Your Ultimate Guide to Bright, Clear Skin, out today. The 192-page guide shows readers how to find the right ingredients, in the right combination, at the right concentration. It is built on the same philosophy that powers Dr Sam’s clinic and sets it apart.

In this interview with TheIndustry.beauty, Dr Sam talks about her unusual first job in beauty - a TV presenting role on Extreme Beauty Disasters - and what she learned from the experience. She also discusses the inspiration behind her new book, the beauty founder she most admires and what the next chapter of her career looks like as she expands the Dr Sam’s brand internationally.

Have you always had an interest in beauty? Why does it appeal to you and why did you want to work within it?

Beauty wasn't really on my radar growing up in Donaghadee in Northern Ireland. I was a science person, with straight As, headed for Cambridge University to study Medicine - that was the path. But somewhere along the way, I fell in love with fashion, started reading magazines like American Vogue, and noticed that the dermatologists I admired most in the US, people like Doris Day and Lisa Erin, had built careers that went beyond treating skin disease. They were creating beautiful skin and that distinction lodged itself in my brain quite early.

My own experience with acne as a junior doctor made it personal. The hours, the stress, the diet - it caught up with everyone. And when I started my own practice, I was inundated with women in exactly the same position I'd been in: grown-ups who wanted to address the early signs of ageing but couldn't use most of what was on the market because it would make them break out. That felt like a real failure of the industry and it made me want to do something about it.

Beauty appeals to me because, at its best, it isn't frivolous - it's genuinely life-changing. I've watched people shrink and make themselves invisible because of a very treatable skin concern. When that resolves, something opens up in them. Helping them achieve that transformation never gets old.

Tell us about your first job in beauty. What drew you to the role? What was this experience like?

I'd consider my first TV presenting role as my first job in beauty - presenting Extreme Beauty Disasters on TLC. It was my first experience of doing television, learning to talk to a camera, and it was a genuinely formative one.

As a shy girl from Northern Ireland, it was almost therapeutic. Overcoming the anxiety around public speaking doesn't happen overnight, but being put in front of a camera repeatedly, working with a fantastic team, and encountering such an incredible array of cases in need of my help accelerated that process enormously.

Learning to communicate clearly and naturally on camera is a skill that has served me ever since - in the clinic, on YouTube, across social media, and now in building the brand. I don't think I'd be half as effective at any of it without having gone through that early experience.

What were the most valuable skills or lessons you gained from that first experience?

Seeing how brands operated from the inside, both well and badly, taught me that how you do one thing in business is really how you do everything. The brands that impressed me were ruthlessly consistent and meticulous. The ones that didn't were often spending significant money on the wrong things, executing events poorly, and overcomplicating the customer experience. That was instructive.

The deeper lesson was about trust. What patients valued most in the clinic wasn't the breadth of what I could offer - it was the edit. 'I've done the thinking for you. You don't need to worry about ingredients or research. Here's exactly what to do.' That level of explicitness, that willingness to say both what to use and what to stop using, was what got results. People followed through, came back three months later having actually changed their skin, and told other people. I took that principle directly into the brand.

What do you most enjoy about your current role?

The variety is a big part of it. On any given week, I might be in the clinic, doing a shoot, filming content, sitting with the data, or working on something entirely new. I genuinely don't get bored.

But the thing that gives me the most satisfaction is the feedback loop. DTC means you're very close to your customer - you can watch in real time what's working, connect the dots between a piece of content or a campaign and what happens to the numbers. On a difficult day, I'll go and read the reviews. That always recalibrates things and reminds me of my purpose.

And then there are the moments when someone stops me in the street and says, 'You helped me sort my skin before my sister's wedding and my life is so much better'. I get a physical feeling in my body when that happens. That's the reason for all of it, and I don't think it will ever stop mattering to me.

If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of advice at the very start of your career, what would it be - and why?

Never underestimate yourself. I delayed starting the business for longer than I should have because I thought I needed a partner - someone who 'knew business' - because I didn't have formal training. What I've learned is that you can work things out as you go. Even the things that feel completely outside your comfort zone.

The confidence that comes from doing that, from solving problems you didn't think you could solve, compounds over time. I'm a fundamentally different person professionally than I was seven years ago, and that growth came from backing myself rather than waiting until I felt ready. You're never fully ready. Start anyway.

What does the next chapter of your own career look like and how are you hoping to grow from here?

The focus right now is on broadening our retail footprint and pushing internationally. We've built something that I believe can become the most trusted doctor brand in the world; the proposition is sound and the results speak for themselves. Sephora was a strong platform to launch retail and now we're also in Space NK across 54 stores. I have a book coming out today, titled FLAWLESS, which feels like a natural extension of everything I've been doing, making rigorous skin science genuinely accessible.

Has there been a person in beauty that you have always admired and why?

Marcia Kilgore, without question. She's a serial founder who started entirely from scratch - Bliss Spa in New York, then Soap & Glory, FitFlop and Beauty Pie - each one a different category, each one built against the grain of what the industry was doing at the time. That ability to spot where convention is failing the consumer and then go and fix it, repeatedly, across completely different businesses, is something I find genuinely extraordinary.

What I admire most is the sheer drive and determination, combined with a refusal to follow traditional beauty norms. She doesn't do things the way they've always been done. She asks whether they need to be done that way at all. That's a mindset I recognise and aspire to. I admired her enough that I once bid at a charity auction just to get half an hour of her time. That probably says everything.