Second coming; Marcia Kilgore has always approached beauty with a combination of science, humor, and savvy.

Byline: Sarah Brown

Where in the world has Marcia Kilgore-the tireless entrepreneur, Miss Bliss to her fans-been hiding? In London, where she moved last year, shortly after opening a Bliss outpost on Sloane Avenue. Since then, the onetime trainer and facialist who founded Bliss Spa in 1996 with $300,000-and sold a 70 percent stake to LVMH in 1999 for a reported $30 million (the company has since been acquired by Starwood Hotels & Resorts)-has started a consulting firm and launched a new beauty brand, called Soap & Glory. Lately she's been putting the finishing touches on her sprawling South Kensington home; she's in heavy-duty product-_development mode for

Bliss (for which she consults), as well as her new venture; she's been working on the Fit Flop, a patent-pending flip-flop that works your leg muscles as you stroll around town. And, as she points out while nibbling a cookie, "I'm on maternity leave. So it's a little hectic." Kilgore has invited me for tea just nine days after giving birth to Raphael, a little brother for two-and-a-half-year-old Louis.

Kilgore is like a windup doll that never unwinds. She has an idea a minute. She speaks in sound bites and clever puns. "Entertainment cosmetics" is how she describes Soap & Glory, a line of bath and body products all priced under [pounds sterling]10 (about $19). "There's entertainment wrapped around the entire product," she says of the light-pink packaging plastered with tongue-in-cheek headlines and banners. "At heart, I always wanted to be an entertainer-a singer. Doing cosmetics and being able to give people a good laugh is my way of entertaining the masses." As with the products she created at Bliss, Soap & Glory is serious stuff that doesn't take itself too seriously.

yes, you can have it all, trumpets the Clean On Me clarifying shower gel with built-in body lotion. transform your scaly legs from reptilian to radiant! screams the ...