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Guerlain has been a fixture of French luxury beauty for nearly 200 years. In an industry where new brands seem to appear overnight, maintaining that kind of longevity, and staying relevant throughout, is no small feat. As you can imagine, this has meant a lot of product launches; but according to the brand not every new idea is rushed to market.
“We take our time at Guerlain, waiting until we have something truly meaningful to offer the world,” CEO Gabrielle Saint-Genis tells Vogue. “When you’re a house that has been passionate about fragrance and cosmetics for 200 years, you are obsessed with innovating.”
One area this innovation has played out is Guerlain’s work with honey. For more than 15 years, Guerlain has developed a multi-parameter selection process to identify honeys with increasingly powerful repair activities, per Dr. Frédéric Bonté, Guerlain’s director of scientific communication. The research is far more involved than simply identifying different varieties of honey: It includes studying honeybees, analyzing the composition of the honey they produce, and examining the environments in which they live.
Ouessant Island, off the coast of France, has become especially important to Guerlain’s honey-focused skin-care research. The honey sourced from the island contains a distinct composition of amino acids, vitamins, and other naturally occurring components. “This honey has also demonstrated significant activity on epidermal and dermal biological targets,” Dr. Bonté tells Vogue.
Of course, skincare is only one part of Guerlain’s history. Fragrance has been central to the house since its earliest days, and it remains another category in which the brand looks to its past while continuing to move forward. “For fragrance, rather than inventing perfumes from scratch, we find it interesting to look back at our heritage,” says Saint-Genis. “When you manage to transform tradition into modernity, it really resonates with what young people are looking for right now. Who else has 200 years of history in fragrance? It’s an obvious point of differentiation.”
Then, there is the makeup. Guerlain’s beauty history includes products that have earned classic status in their own right, from Rouge G, the lipstick housed in its unmistakable refillable case, to Météorites, the colorful pearls of powder designed to bring a softly luminous finish to the complexion. It’s that balance of heritage and continued experimentation that has allowed the house to remain part of the beauty conversation for nearly two centuries—and suggests it has no intention of stepping away anytime soon. Scroll on to discover Vogue ’s favorite Guerlain products.
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Save to wishlist Save to wishlist Guerlain
Save to wishlist Save to wishlist Guerlain
Save to wishlist Save to wishlist Guerlain
Save to wishlist Save to wishlist Guerlain
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