About Us

Stargazer started in 1979 on a market stall on London's Kings Road, in the middle of the punk scene that was exploding around us. Kings Road wasn't just a shopping street back then — it was where a lot of British subculture was inventing itself in real time, and we were selling face paint and colour to people who wanted to look like nobody else on the bus home. That's still, more or less, the entire brief.

We didn't start as a "brand" in the way that word gets used now. We started because the makeup on the shelves at the time was made for one look, and there was a whole crowd of people — punks, then goths, then ravers, then whoever came next — who wanted colour that didn't exist anywhere else. Neon that actually glowed. Black that was actually black, not a very dark brown. Hair colour that didn't pretend to be natural. So we made it ourselves.

Nearly fifty years on, we're still doing that, and we're still doing it here. Every product we sell is manufactured in the UK — that's not a claim we make for a badge, it's just where the factory is, and it's what's kept our formulas consistent since long before "cruelty-free" was something companies put on packaging to look good. We were cruelty-free before it was a marketing category, because the people buying from that Kings Road stall would have told us exactly what they thought if we weren't.

We're honest about where our vegan claims stop, too. Most of our range is vegan, but a handful of products use beeswax or lanolin, and we'd rather tell you which ones than let you assume the whole catalogue is something it isn't. If a badge is on a product, it means what it says, checked against the actual formula, not the collection it happens to sit in.

What we make now would probably still make sense to the people running that stall in 1979: bold face and body colour, UV-reactive neon, glitter that doesn't behave like an afterthought, semi-permanent hair dye in shades built for people who change their mind about their hair more than once a year, and a cosplay and festival range shaped by customers who actually go to the events, not a marketing team guessing what they'd want.

We're a small UK manufacturer, not a conglomerate brand with twelve names behind it. That means when something in the range changes — a new shade, a reformulation, a product we've discontinued because it wasn't good enough — it's because someone here decided it, not a boardroom three countries away. It also means if you email us, an actual person who knows the products replies.

Punk turned into goth, goth turned into festival and cosplay and everything since, and every one of those scenes needed colour the mainstream wasn't making. We've spent nearly five decades making it. We're not trying to be for everyone — we're trying to be right for the people who were never going to be served by the middle of the market in the first place.