PARIS — The world’s first lipstick. The first trendy fragrance. A pivoting toothbrush. The authentic Nivea cream and serum. Not to say the intimate secrets and techniques of Queen Elizabeth II. These are among the treasures held in Guerlain’s first archive, which brings tales from the enduring French beauty firm’s sensational previous to life.
Guerlain gave The Associated Press unique worldwide media entry to its newly opened assortment, a warehouse of wonders shrouded in secrecy and hidden from public view by Paris’ Seine River. It’s a gem of paperwork and mysterious objects spanning three centuries, every with a singular historical past of its personal.
Yet what is probably most exceptional concerning the assortment is that the corporate based in 1828 that invented trendy perfumery hadn’t assembled it earlier than.
“It’s what we call our little secret,” stated Guerlain heritage director Ann Caroline Prazan, who sifted by means of a mine of artifacts to compile it in a years-long labor of affection. “It was hard to whittle down 18,000 pieces to just 400 from so many years, but we did it … Some of the pieces are so fragile, I’m scared to touch them.”
The bold venture exists because of Prazan‘s passion – and patience. Through a mist of perfume, she reels off vignettes about Guerlain’s improvements and well-known patrons, together with French Empress Eugenie, Josephine Baker, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Barbra Streisand, Margaret Thatcher and the late U.Okay. queen.
As Prazan turned to deal with the gathering’s most prized object, a lipstick created in 1870 and housed in a recent trying gold bullet, she rigorously took off her white gloves as if she had been performing a sacred ritual.
“It’s so modern,” she whispered, her finger rigorously working a push-up mechanism to disclose a darkish Bordeaux wax pigment nonetheless intact after 153 years.
The refillable lipstick has a exceptional story, like every part else within the archive appears to. An worker of Aime and Gabriel Guerlain was strolling in a avenue and occurred upon the shop of a candlemaker, whose wax and coloured pigments gave him a eureka second.
At the time, ladies used tubs of coloured powder to color their lips with a clunky brush. Seeing the candlemaker’s instruments gave the Guerlain worker the “mad” concept of making a waxy, lip beauty as a stick, Prazan stated.
“That small object revolutionized women’s makeup forever,” she stated.
Prazan additionally procured the world’s first ever lipliner, additionally in glossy gold casing, and a 3rd stick – that one AP journalist couldn’t determine. It turned out to be a liner that ladies used to color the veins on their arms and necks blue, a preferred method ladies utilized in late nineteenth century Paris to look paler. Thankfully, Prazan stated, it has gone out of trend.
That Guerlain is a family-run home throughout 5 successive generations is probably one cause why these archival items have been so fastidiously stored. The firm was purchased by luxurious conglomerate LVMH in 1994, however has managed to maintain its distinctive identification.
Innovation, together with past the sphere of fragrance, is the model’s hallmark. Among the archival treasures is the patent for the primary pivoting toothbrush. Documents revealed a 1845 design that regarded like a precursor to at the moment’s electrical toothbrush.
A bath of moisturizing cream referred to as Nivea that was whisked out of a drawer informed one other story that linked previous and current. The cream, which contained substances to whiten the pores and skin of European ladies, was offered off by the home to create the well-known skincare firm of the identical title.
Then there’s the previous bottle of Jicky, the world’s first trendy fragrance. Created in 1889, it revolutionized the market with the idea of a scent cocktail – not only one observe like earlier fragrances – that featured hints of spice, lemon, lavender, wooden and vanilla. It additionally included artificial substances and is, extremely, the world’s oldest repeatedly produced fragrance.
Yet it’s the anecdotes of the home’s stars that deliver essentially the most dazzle to a group which appears so alive regardless of its historical past.
Queen Elizabeth II, featured in a photograph on the wall sporting a glamorous white fur stole, was such a fan of Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue fragrance, Prazan says, that she emptied a bottle and stuffed it up with the oil from her 1952 coronation. It was stored for years, such was the late monarch’s emotional attachment to the scent.
From one other archive shelf, a bottle for a unique fragrance gleamed with attract. It was the perfume created for the baptism of the queen’s uncle years earlier than he turned King Edward VII – and famously abdicated the throne for love. Sometimes the gathering looks as if a potted timeline of the important thing moments of the world’s historic figures.
While the archive is an secret affair, the model has created an exhibit open to the general public for the a hundred and seventieth anniversary of its most well-known design, the Bee Bottle. The exhibit, referred to as “Chere Eugenie,” is on view at Guerlain’s Champs-Elysees store till Sept. 4.
There, the unique Bee Bottle – a historic artifact – is on show like a crown jewel with gentle reflecting off hand-painted bee reliefs. It was created in 1853 for the nuptials of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III.
The bee was the French imperial emblem and likewise the logo of Clovis, first king of the Francs. It has come to symbolize Guerlain to today.
For the bottle’s anniversary, 11 worldwide artists and actors, together with Charlotte Rampling and Audrey Tatou, created a sequence of pictures impressed by the Bee Bottle.
A foot previously with eyes to the long run appear to outline Guerlain, a mantra its longevity has pressured the corporate to good.
“I plan well into the future, easily 100 years away,” Prazan famous whereas placing away her almost 200-year-old objects. “I know the house will be around for that long, long after we’re gone. How many people can say that?”
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