Barry M bought by make-up rival Warpaint

Barry M had been a favourite of make-up fans and drag queens for its eye-catching colours.

It is stocked in around 1,300 shops across the UK, including Superdrug, Boots, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.

Patrick O’Brien, retail research director at analytics firm GlobalData, said Barry M had failed to innovate and had instead been “more reactive”.

He told the BBC the company had also struggled as, despite being stocked in well-known retailers, it faced increasing competition from other brands at similar prices.

O’Brien said Barry M had become “a small brand in a sea of new and fun names, which are generating traction through social media marketing”.

Since Mero’s death in 2014, the company has been run by his son, Dean Mero.

Speaking to the BBC in 2022, Dean said his father had been hoping to target the punks and New Romantics of the early 1980s.

His father reasoned that these people were looking for “the blacks and the blues and the greens and the yellows”, but why not offer more than that?

He remembers his father saying that no other make-up company had produced 100 colours and Barry M would become the first to reach that goal.