NATURAL BEAUTY

As Chief Commercial Officer of Chantecaille, Alex Chantecaille is leading a modern-day beauty brand firmly rooted in nature. Founded 25 years ago by Alex’s mother, Sylvie, and sister, Olivia, Chantecaille uses botanicals’ healing and nourishing powers to create luxurious skincare and beauty products. With a commitment to environmental philanthropy at its core, Chantecaille fosters both the beauty in our world and in our skin. This executive shares the remarkable story of her family brand with Sheridan Road.

1. Chantecaille’s 25th anniversary must feel like a time for reflection—how has the brand changed and evolved over the years?
   Our brand pillars—botanicals, philanthropy, and innovation— have always been at the core of Chantecaille. We love celebrating the beauty of nature, helping to preserve it, and to be very chic and modern about it at the same time. It started with a passion for flowers and how well they support the skin and has evolved into protecting those areas of nature and ultimately, the animals that live within that nature with our conservation collections. What has changed in the industry is that people care more than ever about natural ingredients, conservation, and about makeup that nourishes your skin versus just masking it. The world has caught up with my mom’s vision for beauty.
   
2. Chantecaille is a French luxury brand based on flowers. Why flowers?
   When Mom started the company, she had this lightbulb idea to be able to extract wax from a flower to create the base. She always loved gardening and flowers, as had her mother before her, and she believed in their healing powers and ability to work with the skin rather than against it.
   
3. What products can we look forward to—anything exciting or new you can share? 24K Gold Serum Intense is a brand-new supercharged serum full of line-plumping peptides as well as a novel vitamin C bonded to gold, making it very stable and effective when it’s delivered to the skin.
   Wild Meadows is a stunning collection that celebrates true wildflowers embedded in wheat fields in Romanian’s Carpathian Mountains—where old-fashioned farming is still the norm, representing a gentler way to farm the land and celebrating true biodiversity. Wild orchids and miniature hyacinths all grow amongst the wheat and these fields are abuzz with life, making space for over 200 migrating bird species, pollinators, and even wild boar and lynx that travel down from the Transylvanian mountains—it’s the ideal picture of a softer way to farm that supports all creatures in that ecosystem.
   
4. A big part of Chantecaille—besides using the power of plants in your formulas— is your commitment to environmental philanthropy. Tell us more about that.
   We are so inspired by nature and literally borrow from it for our formulas, so we wanted to celebrate it and help protect it. Both as a company and as human beings, we take from nature and are inspired by it. So, the true joy of doing what we do is giving back to nature on a daily basis whether we are protecting wild horses, sea turtles, coral reefs, wild meadows, or African elephants.
5. A few favorites:
   1. For glowing skin: Bio Lifting Serum+, Rose De Mai Cream, and the new Sheer Glow Rose Face Tint under my Future Skin Foundation.
   
   2. For firming and lifting: New 24K Gold Serum layered over the Gold Recovery Intense Concentrate A.M + P.M and 24K Gold Energizing Eye Cream. The regenerating and brightening peptides are next level in this collection.
   
   3. For fresh skin: Pure Rosewater, Radiance Elixir, and Oil Free Balancing Moisturizer—so clean feeling and balances out any breakouts, especially from travel.
   
   4. Lipstick of choice: Wild Meadows Lip Chic. I am loving the fresh, slightly hot pink shade Crocus and the softer blush shade Meadow. I just break out into a big smile when I pull them out for a touchup—I always want to show them off to nearby friends and strangers alike because they’re so pretty!
   
   5. Blush of choice: Wild Meadows Blush in Anemone when it’s a cheeky day! And the softer Wild Meadows shade, Apple Blossom, on days when I want a more subtle blush.

For more information, visit the Chantecaille counter at Neiman Marcus in Northbrook or chantecaille.com.