Celebrity favourite Biologique Recherche ventures into bespoke skincare

One company’s approach to caring for the body’s biggest organ goes beyond the bespoke, even venturing into your DNA.

Biologique Recherche’s rigorous approach tailors products to the individual.

French skincare company Biologique Recherche is the kind of brand that talks softly but carries a big stick, to loosely borrow the late Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy. Softly, because despite never advertising, it commands an almost fanatical legion of clientele. Nicole Kidman has been known to use its products. Lara Worthington swears by them, as does Zoë Kravitz. And even Brad Pitt allegedly stocked them before he launched his own line.

Softly, because the packaging is as nondescript as a luxury skincare brand could dare to be. Plain, even. And big stick because it carries the gravitas of a product line that doesn’t pretend to deliver or promise miracles but instead traceable results, directly measured via the health of your skin courtesy of its elite Biologique Recherche Haute Couture line.

The brand brings to skincare what the art of haute couture brings to the garment industry: a promise of customisation built entirely around treating and complementing the unique needs of your individual skin. The real needs, too. Not just what we’ve convinced ourselves we need.

Some of the products used by clients undertaking the Haute Couture program. Photo: Supplied

“We don’t have one skin, we have several,” explains the company’s in-house skincare expert Dr Dominique Léonard. In Sydney to launch the Biologique Recherche Haute Couture experience at Sydney’s swish Melanie Grant skin clinic in Double Bay, Léonard explains that our skin is much like a fingerprint – unique to each of us, and with needs that are equally unique and complex.

“The skin of our forehead is different from our T-zone and different from our eye contour or neck,” she says. “Many external factors such as climate, tobacco and pollution, and internal factors such as stress, lifestyle and age, differently affect the epidermis physiology of each person. A person can have different imbalances simultaneously, for example redness and sensitivity, with hyper-seborrhoea and pigmentation or scarring. Every skin is unique and constantly changing.”

“The program is the epitome of personalised skin care,” explains Melanie Grant, who also confirms that the Haute Couture experience will be exclusive to her clinic in Australia. “Everyone’s result will be specific to them. This is a highly detailed process that gives you the capacity not only to care for your skin in its current state, but to pre-empt its future behaviour.”

To tease out the fashion analogy, investing in skincare off the shelf to treat your very specific skin can be like buying a suit or dress off the rack. It will do the job but the difference is in the details, and details are exactly where Biologique Recherche’s Haute Couture regimen excels – the microscopic, below-the-surface details, down to your DNA, that dictate the long-term health of your complexion. Rather than simply attempting to fit your skin into one of four familiar groups, Biologique Recherche Haute Couture is tailor-made to nourish, treat and improve the skin’s condition from the ground – or cellular level – up.

The assessment that takes place to formulate your ideal skincare regimen. Photo: Supplied

“We’re all used to categorising skin as oily, dry, sensitive, combination, almost as a kneejerk response,” explains Grant. You could define it as the Myers-Briggs of skincare. “[Skin] is and has always been far more nuanced than that. No one’s complexion is completely unified, and we all endure ebbs and flows throughout the day, the month, the seasons of the year and our lives. So regardless of traditional skin type, I’ve always been an advocate for checking in with yourself, taking stock of how your skin is functioning on any given day, and being simple and most importantly, strategic with your approach, adjusting where and when you need to.”

Charmingly, Biologique Recherche’s origins lie in fact in a love story. The brand was launched by the French biochemist Yvan Allouche and his wife Josette, a physiotherapist, back in 1977 after Josette struggled to find products that were efficient enough in their results. Combining their respective expertise, the couple worked together to develop a highly concentrated, results-driven skincare system that is almost regimented in its application and specificity of use.

Forty-five years later, the brand’s reputation precedes it in Australia, where until recently it was difficult to source. Add to this Biologique Recherche’s refusal to advertise or self-promote, which has ensured an “if you know, you know” mystery surrounding the brand. That hasn’t prevented its products appearing in plenty of beauty editor’s favourite lists. The best-selling exfoliant Lotion P50 is spoken about with awe, as much for its effectiveness in rebuilding the lipid shield and balancing the skin’s sebum production as for its distinctive smell.

Is custom-made skincare the new frontier?

The Haute Couture experience is the sum of the brand’s expertise and research. It also involves a rigorous, almost intrusive, assessment of your skin. Which hopefully is somewhat thick, figuratively speaking, because the results can be confronting. Think you know your visage? Think again.

When I meet Léonard, who is dressed in a white lab coat, surgical mask and latex gloves, for the first of several ongoing consultations, the mood within the normally tranquil treatment rooms at Melanie Grant makes it feel more like a medical visit. Which isn’t too far from its purpose. Sample readings of my skin are taken using the brand’s Skin Instant Lab diagnostic equipment, testing everything from hydration to pigmentation, sensitivities, oil production, water loss and even luminosity. There’s also a deep dive into my lifestyle factors. Some are obvious: do I smoke? No. Drink? I’m Irish. Sunscreen, sleep habits etc. But there are a few surprises: exercise, it seems, isn’t quite as great if you want perfect skin as it is for chiselled biceps and abs. At least not those high-intensity workouts. So if I want to look younger I need to cut back on those? Fine by me!

Then there’s DNA testing. A saliva sample is taken and shipped off to Paris along with your Skin Instant Lab diagnostic readings, where the results are used to interpret exactly what your skin needs to reach optimum health, functionality and clarity. According to Grant, harvesting this information is important because the “DNA assessment has the ability to reveal the skin’s potential, revealing the possibility and probability of future skin conditions as well as its ability to function optimally.”

“This level of consultation informs a series of custom formulas made specifically for you at the Biologique Recherche lab in Paris,” she explains. “The formulas are created using the full library of active ingredients currently included in more than 120 of Biologique Recherche’s facial formulas, in addition to 200 or so additional high-potency ingredients that are specific only to the Haute Couture Program.”

When the results, and prescribed products, come in several months later, it’s almost anticlimactic. Seven small vials, two creams, a masque, a cleanser (there’s only one, they’re so sure of its effectiveness) to use in a month, and a folder that contains the ins and outs of your skin’s needs and deficiencies. (Turns out I have thinner skin than is the norm for a male. It’s luminous with good elasticity but terrible sebum levels on my cheeks, which are a bit dry.)

But if there’s one thing life likes to remind us of, it’s not the size of the thing but how it works that counts. This is at the core of what Biologique Recherche is about – potency and efficiency. It’s not about a lot of products, explains Lonard, but products that target what needs to be done. “Biologique Recherche is a result-oriented brand,” she adds. “Results are shown instantly after a treatment and a few days only after starting the use of our products, and this is a huge advantage for us.”

Here’s the kick. Results – yes. Several days after using the Biologique Recherche, my skin was smoother and firmer, and redness had decreased. Compliments were coming in from friends I hadn’t seen in some time. (“What’s your secret?!” “I stopped exercising!”) But those results come with a price tag. The Haute Couture program is available over a one-, three- or six-month period and has a starting value of $5000. The full experience, including follow-up treatments, costs a tidy $25,000. Beauty is pain, as they say. But the proof of the product – and its value – is in the pudding. It does the job. But for those of us who might not have the spare dollars lying about, there’s no need to despair, says Grant. Just as off-the-rack fashion does the job, so does good quality skincare even if it isn’t tailored. It depends on what your needs are.

“All ranges have their place and purpose and it depends on what you want to achieve with your skin, and how,” explains Grant. “It’s difficult to compare Biologique Recherche to other lines, whether organic or cosmeceutical. Biologique Recherche is – and has always been – in a field of its own, not only because of its unique selection of biomimetic ingredients, but also because of the level of sophistication of each formula.”