Sonya Lennon

If I hate it, I can walk away.

And if I love it, then I'm on a whole new path.

And what happened was that I started in RTE in June or July of 2008.

And by the time we were on air with the first show in September.

The sector that I just left had crumbled because of the international global crisis.

It was gone and I couldn't have done a bit of both.

It was full time.

Like when we were on and we were shooting, it was full time.

full on, you know, and every makeover took three weeks, tail to tail.

You were living in these people's lives.

You were, you know, when I look back on it, we were part psychotherapist, part stylist, you know, and we lived through the evolution of these women.

Now, in fairness, they'd done a huge amount of work

to get to the point where they were and to be right for the show.

Yes.

But for us to then layer on top of that a sense of permission to say, you can feel good about yourself.

That's what they needed.

Completely.

Because I saw the kind of democratisation of what I had been doing.

Whereas I'd been working at a very kind of niche, elite level.

I saw then, well, actually, if you give this gift to people, general people, it can change their lives.