San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘WAREHOUSE OF WONDERS’ PRESERVES COSMETICS HISTORY
Guerlain collection has items spanning three centuries
The world’s first lipstick. The first modern perfume. A pivoting toothbrush. The original Nivea cream and serum. Not to mention the intimate secrets of Queen Elizabeth II. These are some of the treasures held in Guerlain’s first archive, which brings stories from the iconic French cosmetic company’s sensational past to life.
Guerlain gave The Associated Press exclusive international media access to its newly opened collection, a warehouse of wonders shrouded in secrecy and hidden from public view by Paris’ Seine River. It’s a gem of documents and mysterious objects spanning three centuries, each with a unique history of its own.
Yet what is perhaps most remarkable about the collection is that the company founded in 1828 that invented modern perfumery hadn’t assembled it before.
“It’s what we call our little secret,” said Guerlain heritage director Ann Caroline Prazan, who sifted through a mine of artifacts to compile it in a years-long labor of love. “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 ambitious project exists thanks to Prazan’s passion — and patience. Through a mist of perfume, she reels off vignettes about Guerlain’s innovations and famous patrons, including French Empress Eugenie, Josephine Baker, Grace Kelly, Jacqueline Kennedy, Barbra Streisand, Margaret Thatcher and the late U.K. queen.
As Prazan turned to handle the collection’s most prized object, a lipstick created in 1870 and housed in a contemporary looking gold bullet, she carefully took off her white gloves as if she were performing a sacred ritual.
“It’s so modern,” she whispered, her finger carefully operating a push-up mechanism to reveal a dark Bordeaux wax pigment still intact after 153 years.
The refillable lipstick has a remarkable story, like everything else in the archive seems to. An employee of Aime and Gabriel Guerlain was walking in a street and happened upon the store of a candlemaker, whose wax and colored pigments gave him a eureka moment.
At the time, women used tubs of colored powder to paint their lips with a clunky brush. Seeing the candlemaker’s tools gave the Guerlain employee the “mad” idea of creating a waxy lip cosmetic as a stick, Prazan said.
“That small object revolutionized women’s makeup forever,” she said.
That Guerlain is a familyrun house across five successive generations is perhaps one reason why these archival pieces have been so fastidiously kept.
A foot in the past with eyes to the future seem to define Guerlain, a mantra its longevity has forced the company to perfect.
“I plan well into the future, easily 100 years away,” Prazan noted while putting away her nearly 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?”