Growing up in Paris, I enjoyed my mother’s visits to the pharmacy. While she picked up the prescriptions, I looked at the beauty products packaged in clinical, unadorned boxes that promised glowing, healthy skin. For me, they encapsulated the serious skincare regimen practiced by so many French women.
Garance Doré, the French style blogger, wants to bring this approach to the US. In May, she launched a new beauty brand called Doré, with her long-time business partner, Emily Yeston, that focuses on creating versatile products and multifunctional that use gentle and moisturizing ingredients. . At a time when the beauty industry is inundated with dozens of flashy new brands, Doré believes a simple, minimalist aesthetic will grab people’s attention.
[Photo: Doré]Doré, 47, grew up in Corsica, an island off the coast of France. In 2011, she moved to New York City and blogged about street style, shot shoots for brands, created videos, and wrote a monthly column for French Vogue. She helped pioneer the kind of multi-hyphenate career that would eventually be copied by fashion and beauty influencers on Instagram and TikTok. But as the landscape of fashion influencers became increasingly crowded, Doré wanted to embark on a new adventure. Two years ago, she and Yeston decided to launch a beauty brand.
The beauty industry is crowded: currently worth $511 billion worldwide, it’s projected to hit $716 billion by 2025. But even with so many competing brands, Doré thinks there’s plenty of demand from beauty companies. consumers, who are eager to try new products. And while many brands try to grab people’s attention with elaborate packaging and big promises about how they will transform your skin, Doré wanted to do just the opposite. Her new line has stark packaging and focuses on the basics of skincare: cleansing and hydration.
[Photo: Doré]Doré was inspired by the French drugstore brands that he saw grow. “There was a feeling, among some French women, that they were too smart to give in to the hype from big beauty brands,” she says. “They knew the real secret was in these everyday products that were multifunctional and worked well.” She’s referring to simple lip balms like Labello that some women use to moisturize other dry areas of their body, or inexpensive creams like Nivea that are used as daily moisturizers.
After spending years embedded in the fashion industry, Doré has tried many beauty products on the market. A decade ago, when she shared her beauty routine with the Into the Gloss blog, she mentioned everything from Murad’s Intensive Wrinkle Reducer eye cream to Kiehl’s Creme de Corps body lotion and Fresh Sugar face scrub. But over the years, she has found that these products damage her skin. “They are packed with too many ingredients that have ultimately made my skin dry and irritated,” she says. “The thing about French pharmaceutical brands is that they focused on the essentials, which really means keeping the skin hydrated. Most don’t even have fragrance.”
Doré and Yeston partnered with a French lab to create three products for the launch, none of which have added fragrance: a moisturizer ($36), a balm ($12), and a cleanser ($24). Doré wanted to create products that could accomplish several things at once. The cleanser is an effective makeup remover, and the balm can be used anywhere you need extra hydration. Yeston says he uses them on bug bites to reduce itching.
[Photo: Doré]While the French pharmaceutical brands of their childhood used to use science-based ingredients that were designed to be ultra-effective, today consumers are looking for safe, non-toxic ingredients. As Doré and Yeston created their products, they partnered with the Environmental Working Group (EWG), which certifies that products are free of chemicals known to be toxic. “What we liked about the EWG standard is that it doesn’t focus on natural or organic ingredients, but on any ingredient that is known to be safe,” says Yeston. “Some synthetic ingredients are very safe and effective.”
[Photo: Doré]Over the years, other fashion and beauty influencers have also launched beauty lines; most notably Emily Weiss, who founded Into the Gloss in 2010 and went on to launch Glossier, a DTC beauty brand, several years later. (While the company was valued at $1.8 billion last year, it recently laid off a third of its staff.) The brand became iconic for its millennial pink packaging and marketing that resonated with younger consumers. Doré says his brand has some notable differences from Glossier. “We focus less on marketing to a single generation,” she says. “Our products are designed to appeal to a broad swath of beauty consumers, who may use our products alongside others they love.”
Design-wise, Doré wanted to be as minimalist as possible. The collection comes in recycled green tubes and jars. This contrasts with the elaborate packaging you can see at Sephora from brands like SK-II, whose latest collection comes in doll-like bottles, or Guerlain, with its glamorous gold bottles. “I definitely like to have Guerlain bottles on my counter because they are so beautiful,” says Doré. “But for products I use every day, I’m more interested in what’s inside the bottle.”
Source: www.fastcompany.com