L’Occitane celebrates 40 years of beauty
It’s 1976, and a young Frenchman by the name of Olivier Baussan watches over a copper still, waiting for drops of essential oil from rosemary to fall.
The fragrant oil he extracts goes into scenting soaps he calls “savons a l’ancienne,” which he sells to drugstores under the brand name L’Occitane.
“With the doors of my 2CV (a Citroen car shaped like a VW Beetle) taken off, I could load the plants more easily and transport them to the distillation still,” Baussan recalls. “It was the first day… I was happy.”
Forty years later, L’Occitane is sold in 3,000 stores around the world, and the brand is synonymous with Provence, its fragrant harvests, and Baussan’s natural, mostly organic products that transport users to the Mediterranean and its idyllic way of life.
L’Occitane also stands for values like authenticity, sensoriality and respect, and local partner Rustan’s The Beauty Source celebrated the brand’s 40th anniversary last week at The Farm at San Benito in Lipa, Batangas — a wellness sanctuary that stands for the same values L’Occitane does.
“Like L’Occitane, The Farm also combines nature, tradition and science,” noted Anna Grape, L’Occitane’s education manager in the Philippines.
To illustrate the value of respect, for example, media guests took a class in yoga, a practice that our teacher Earl said shows respect for nature and community. This parallels L’Occitane’s respect for places like Corsica, an island off the south of France where the beauty company relies on a network of distillers and farmers who organically grow 50 hectares of immortelle, which it puts into its popular Divine products and anti-aging line. The company also respects animals, taking a stance against animal testing in all stages of product development.
To explore the value of authenticity, Grape took us on a Discovery Walk to learn about the natural active ingredients and essential oils the company uses, which are mostly organic and of traceable origin.
Lavender: Composer of blue notes
According to Grape, Baussan’s favorite memory as child was walking through fields of lavender on the way to school, and this “Blue Gold of Provence” has become one of L’Occitane’s pillar ingredients. The year 1977 saw L’Occitane’s first harvest of fine lavender, and the brand’s most beautiful and powerful image is of an adult Baussan sitting in a field of lavender, distiller beside him, collecting essential oil from the fragrant purple plants in Haute-Provence, France.
“This is how we picture him starting our brand back in 1976,” Grape said. “He himself delivered the essential oils when he first made them in the early years.”
Today lavender perfumes many L’Occitane products, from bath foams to body care to home sprays. “Our lavender is organic, and part of our commitment is to help sustain the lavender in Provence,” Grape says. “Farmers says that no matter how much you take care of the crop, after two years it will die because of (pests called) leafhoppers, so L’Occitane is working with them to make sure it stays strong in Provence.”
Shea butter: Guardians of treasure
Another important chapter began in 1980, when Baussan first encountered the women of Burkina Faso in Africa. “While lavender is sourced from Provence, Shea is the only collection that we do not harvest from Provence,” Grape says. The fair-trade ingredient is culled from the women of Burkina Faso, who pick the fruit nuts from the ground after they fall from the trees. “It’s called ‘women’s gold’ in Burkina Faso because only women can harvest shea,” Grape says. “Their climate is very dry and mostly desert, so shea butter is really a resource for them.”
In 1980 Baussan went to Burkina Faso and talked to 12 women — most of them single and illiterate but with families to feed — and the women agreed to supply him with shea butter that he would use in his products.
Today that initial group of 12 women has grown to 17,000, from whom L’Occitane sources 660 tons of shea butter every year. “That’s quite a push that helps their economy, and L’Occitane has been cited by the UN for its efforts to support Burkina Faso women, so we’re quite proud of that.”
The most seminal product is L’Occitane’s 100 Percent Organic Shea Butter, a multiuse product that protects, nourishes, moisturizes, soothes and regenerates skin, hair, nails, and is even safe enough to use on babies, while the bestseller is the 20-percent-shea-butter hand cream: for its 40th birthday L’Occitane has issued a special tin filled with three 10-ml hand creams in three fragrances: rose, cherry blossom and Karite Shea.
Verbena: Cultivator of freshness
In 1999 L’Occitane produced its first harvest of verbena, which went into the company’s first fragrance range. The formula for the revitalizing scent was such a global favorite it’s never been changed since then. “It’s a unisex fragrance so it’s for the entire family and perfect for us in a tropical country,” Grape says. “It’s really a commitment to harvest verbena organically. What they strive to do is create that feeling of freshly crushed leaves in your fingers when you smell verbena, so every year they have to make sure the yield is the same… Keeping an organic process it’s really a challenge, but they’re happy to do it.”
In addition to the fragrance, L’Occitane’s verbena floral water is also organic. “The inspiration for the bottle is a verbena leaf trapped in an ice cube, and our founder designed it himself.”
Immortelle: Picker of youth
In 2002 L’Occitane launched the first anti-aging line based on immortelle, “the flower that never fades.” Immortelle grows wild in Corsica but L’Occitane collaborates with six growers who have to keep up to EcoCert standards for organic products. “The immortelle we harvest in Corsica has amazing anti-aging properties. R&D discovered that it has the highest formula for synthesizing collagen and elastin; it can strengthen the life of the protein that strengthens collagen and elastin.”
L’Occitane’s Precious Cream, launched in 2002, used organic immortelle essential oil to address the deep wrinkles of the face and collagen production. “But now our No. 1 anti-aging face care is Divine. Even customers voted it the No. 1 anti-aging cream.”
Almond: Artisan of softness
L’Occitane uses almond for slimming products like Beautiful Shape and Shaping Delight, which helps fight cellulite production. One of L’Occitane’s pillar ingredients, “it’s unique because we source it from a plateau in Provence that’s 500-800 meters high,” Grape says. “There was a time in the 1930s when almond trees started to disappear, but in latter years we started working with Provence farmers and have been able to bring it back to the landscape, especially in Valensole, where we source. We use everything from the almond tree: almond shell, fruit, nut, milk, bud, even last year for the anti-aging body care — think of it as Divine for the body.”
Last year L’Occitane launched its Almond Velvet body serum and balm, which employs almond tree native cell extract to fight five signs of body aging.
After a Farm dinner of raw vegan food we had a food prep workshop the next day to experience L’Occitane’s value of sensoriality. We learned how to make organic romaine lettuce salads with beetroot, pickled pear and wasabi-Caesar dressing that we picnicked on under the trees. The beautiful outdoor setting reminded me so much of Provence that it was like time traveling: it took me back to my visit there a few years back, and I could only think of that young Frenchman, back in 1976, feeling the wonder of bringing Provence and all its beauty to the rest of the world, and celebrating it by recreating the experience at this haven for all things natural halfway around the world in San Benito.
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L’Occitane is available at Rustan’s The Beauty Source.
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