The French Beauty Solution: Time-Tested Secrets to Look and Feel Beautiful Inside and Out - Hardcover

Thomas, Mathilde

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592409512 ISBN 13: 9781592409518

Verlag: Avery, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times bestseller!

Cofounder of the international beauty company Caudalíe shares the simple, natural, time-tested beauty secrets she learned growing up in France that any woman can use to look younger, healthier, and more radiant without harsh products or drastic procedures.
 
When Mathilde Thomas moved from her native France to the United States to expand her skin-care company, Caudalíe, she wanted to find out what American women wanted from their beauty routines. She interviewed thousands of women and was struck by how different the French and American approaches to beauty were. American women are all about the quick fix—the elusive product or procedure that will instantly solve a nagging beauty problem, even if it hurts, is wildly expensive, or is damaging in the long term. The French, by contrast, approach beauty as an essential and pleasurable part of the day, a lifelong and active investment that makes you look and feel good.

Mathilde used these insights to turn Caudalíe into one of America’s top beauty brands. Drawing on her company’s twenty years of scientific skin-care expertise backed by the research of doctors and dermatologists—as well as the beauty secrets she learned growing up on a vineyard in Bordeaux—The French Beauty Solution covers everything from how to use natural ingredients such as oil and honey to wash your face; what foods to eat for healthier hair, skin, and nails; and the amazing properties of grapes and grapeseed oil. She also introduces an easy three-day grape cleanse that European aristocrats have been using to detox for hundreds of years. Blending stories, science, DIY recipes, and tons of savoir faire, The French Beauty Solution is the last beauty regimen you’ll ever need.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mathilde Thomas cofounded the all-natural skin-care line Caudalíe with her husband after taking inspiration in the power of grapes from her parents’ Bordeaux vineyard. Her company’s products are available in more than fifteen thousand stores worldwide. Mathilde now lives in New York City with her family, where she heads Caudalíe USA.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

I grew up in Grenoble, a French village nestled at the foot of the French Alps where the air was pure and clean and the mountain water icy crisp. My parents, Daniel and Florence Cathiard, my younger sister, Alice, and I lived on a farm with my maternal grandparents, Yvonne and Maurice, where we tended a vegetable garden and raised chickens and bees. My grandfather took me hiking all over the mountains, pointing out which plants were edible and which mushrooms were toxic, which herbs could cure a tummy ache and which would staunch a wound, which smelled intoxicatingly minty and which were so pungent they made my nose run.

I was lucky to have grown up in that magical place. Even though my grandparents were teachers and spent much of their time correcting papers and reading, they understood how to be one with nature, and they infused my childhood with their knowledge of plants and all growing things.

This was also the place where I learned my first beauty secrets. Even though we lived far from the high-end commercial fashion world of Paris, we had access to dozens of the best beauty regimens right in our own backyard. My grandmother would make a luscious facial mask from the honey in the beehive at the corner of our garden and would always be certain to gently pat some on my cheeks whenever she applied it to her own, because she knew how soothing and clarifying it was. She’d whip up a super-moisturizing and nourishing hair mask from fresh, green, pungent olive oil and rum and we’d sit together, giggling at the scent, till our hair was saturated. She recognized early on how much I loved different fragrances—we would do blind tastings of different herbs, like tarragon, thyme, basil, sage, and mint, and I could always differentiate them, even as a very small child—and wasn’t surprised at all when I told her I wanted to work in the beauty business.

As I grew older my grandmother and mother started teaching me their time-tested secrets to looking and feeling beautiful, inside and out—secrets they had learned from their own mothers. I was taught that beauty is not something you turn to in a panic when a wrinkle or pimple appears, but that it’s far more important to see it as a ritual, figuring out what routine works best and carrying that with us through our lives. I used those lessons as well as my love for the natural world when my husband, Bertrand, and I founded our skincare company, Caudalie, in 1995, and they were reinforced whenever I returned to the Alps, or went to the vineyard in Bordeaux that my parents bought in 1990.

But it wasn’t until Bertrand and I moved with our children from Paris to New York City to grow Caudalie USA in 2010 that I realized that the French attitude toward beauty was not the same as the American one. Learning about and understanding these nuances was absolutely fascinating to me, and as I traveled all over the country, visiting many of the 350-plus Sephora, Nordstrom, and Blue Mercury stores that carry Caudalie products, meeting personally with thousands of customers that year alone, I realized that American women could benefit from a little of my French beauty wisdom. That while millions of them consider beauty a priority in their daily routine, many of their habits are either too complicated, too expensive, too painful, or simply not effective. That is what inspired me to write The French Beauty Solution.

Whether I was in Cleveland, Ohio, or Cleveland, Florida, the same issues came up time and again as the women I met candidly discussed their beauty needs and desires. Even though I was asking them specifically about what they wanted from a skincare product, without fail, the conversations always veered away from skincare alone. All my customers wanted the same things: To have wonderful skin, simply and quickly. To age with grace. To lead a healthy lifestyle. To be fit and trim. To know which diets work and which don’t. To know how to do a cleanse if they feel the need. To manage their stress. To have a flawlessly made-up face and a doable hairstyle. And to have the kind of effortless beauty and sense of savoir faire that seem to be part of a Frenchwoman’s DNA.

“How do you do it?” these lovely women would ask. “How can I be more, you know, like the French?” I’d laugh and say it really wasn’t all that complicated, only to be met with skeptical smiles.

The women I spoke with would tell me how in awe they were of French stylishness, and I’d tell them how much we envied their beautiful teeth and gorgeous hair.

The more I talked to consumers, the more easily I could clarify what precisely differentiated the French beauty philosophies and habits from the American ones. I learned, of course, that one was not necessarily better than the other, but they were indeed different, and those differences, I believed, were causing the dissatisfaction among the Americans I spoke to. For the French, our beauty routine is predicated on prevention and upkeep and is regarded as an essential, ongoing investment. What I saw here, however, was much more of a tendency toward the quick solution. I was astonished at the inventiveness of ads extolling the next miracle in a jar—which, because these miracles are nonexistent, often lead women to spend a lot of money on a product only to give up on it when it doesn’t solve their problem immediately. And this is precisely what causes so many of the skincare issues women come to talk to me about in the first place—because even the best products need time to work!

Many of these women confessed that they made their beauty choices based on the erroneous notion of no pain/no gain, a deeply American concept that sometimes seems to be conquering the world. They’d tell me about shoes that pinch, crash diets that left them light-headed, and skincare products that irritate their skin—because they felt they had to suffer to be beautiful!

Mon Dieu! I say to that, because the French notion of beauty is quite the opposite. We believe beauty is something to give you pleasure. Because when you feel good, you always look good. And what could be more pleasurable than a sinfully rich homemade honey face mask that costs pennies and takes one minute to whip up before leaving your skin shining, smelling delicious, and feeling like velvet? Or how about a glass of delicious red wine with your dinner to help you relax and fill your body with antioxidants that keep aging at bay? The notion of beauty should be, well, beautiful and pleasing to you above all. This is the biggest difference between the American and French approaches to beauty solutions.

I’ve spent the past two decades engrossed in the study of beauty and wellness, continually studying and testing (I’ve tested some products more than two hundred times!), educating myself on which ingredients pack the most punch while being affordable and as natural and safe as possible—a testament to the lessons I learned growing up.

Even with my upbringing and early lessons in beauty, I would not be writing this book if it weren’t for an unexpected encounter I had on a lovely cloudless October day in 1993. My then boyfriend, Bertrand, and I were staying with my parents at their vineyard, Château Smith Haut Lafitte, to help them with the harvest when a group of scientists from the University of Bordeaux paid us a visit—the vineyard is only a fifteen-minute drive from the center of Bordeaux and is a lovely place to visit, especially in the fall. These scientists were studying the chemical molecules and properties of grapes and grapevines, so it made sense for them to come to the place where some of the best grapes in the world are...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Avery
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1592409512
• ISBN 13: 9781592409518
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Penguin Random House LLC; penguinrandomhouse@penguinrandomhouse.com; ; 1745 Broadway; New York; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Penguin Random House Ireland; https://eu-contact.penguin.ie; ; Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street; Dublin; D02 YH68; Irland