Trinny Woodall has reflected on her life before fame and her struggle to overcome a drug addiction in her early 20s.
The former What Not To Wear host is now a successful beauty mogul but revealed she is actually ‘relieved to be alive’.
Trinny, 61, struggled with substance abuse after leaving boarding school at 16, escaping her shyness through alcohol.
Drug use soon followed, and by 21, she was in rehab, only to be thrown out after a month for a prank on April Fool’s Day.
Despite going to AA meetings, Trinny began using again for another five years before one final two-day binge sparked her return to rehab.
‘I had six friends die in my first year of recovery,’ she told Women’s Health as the cover star for their December issue.
She continued: ‘It’s difficult looking back. If I hadn’t gone through it, I might not be where I am today. We only learn when we’re challenged.’
When chatting with Steven Bartlett on his podcast Diary of a CEO two years ago, she explained loneliness had been a driving factor in her addiction.
‘I missed my old friends, I saw them and then I relapsed and then I went back to meetings and then you’re in this horrible little in-between place.’
After her last ever drink and drug binge, she and her three friends made a pact to get sober, prompting her to return to rehab.
She crashed her car on the way to the treatment facility, having been taking tranquilisers while driving.
Trinny spent a year in rehab as well as time living in a halfway house and back with her parents, rebuilding her life without substance use.
Sadly, all three of her friends from the pact died, with two overdosing and one dying from HIV-related pneumonia, although she was sober.
After getting clean, Trinny starred on What Not To Wear with Susannah Constantine and has become known for her skincare and makeup line, Trinny London.
Her personal life continued to be placed in the spotlight, particularly when it came to her relationships, including with Johnny Elichaoff.
The pair got married in 1999, welcoming their daughter, Lyla, four years later, before splitting in 2009.
Elichaoff took his own life in 2014, falling from a car park roof after struggling for 20 years with an addiction to painkillers.
On the 11 year anniversary of his death on November 12, 2025, Trinny posted family pictures together and wrote: ‘Forever in our hearts ♥️ each year I miss you more.’
She previously told Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast: ‘The regret of somebody who kills himself, it can take you into the darkest hole, but you can also know when somebody who is in that situation switches off, and that is their path, and nobody can get in. I had to learn.’
Lyla at the time ‘couldn’t quite understand’ her father’s death but Trinny added that she ‘loved her dad’.
She then had a 10-year relationship with Charles Saatchi, six weeks after Nigella Lawson divorced him when pictures of him strangling the chef came to light.
The Dragon’s Den star told Women’s Health she was focused now on her life with her daughter, ‘travelling and having dinner with people who fascinate me.’
‘If, along the way, I meet someone, great, but my priority isn’t, “I have to date”. When friends ask, “Have you met someone yet?”.
‘I go, ‘No, and I don’t really give a s**t. By the way, how’s your boring husband?”’
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