Alex Chantecaille Shares Her Spirit of Conservation

The cosmetics industry isn’t all just good looks and cover-ups. Living proof is cosmetics and skincare brand Chantecaille, which has always reinforced its connection with nature, its truthfulness, as well as its transparency.

“That’s the highest quality of luxury, if you think that luxury is access to nature, wonderful experiences and quality products,” says Alex Chantecaille, daughter of founder Sylvie Chantecaille.

The New York based luxury label is run as a family company where values and ethics are priority and respect for clients is the leading motto. French born Sylvie helms the company, supported by her husband Olivier who’s the chief financial officer and her two daughters Olivia (creative director) and Alex (director of sales promotion).

“My mother is still very much the creative force behind it,” says Alex. “She is her own client, but also a woman who has traveled the world and understands women universally. It has taken us longer to grow, but we’ve broken the word of mouth. Women have told their friends, sisters, mothers and aunts. It’s the quality of the product and the invested energy my mom has put into these products to connect them to women. We’ve always put our money in our formulas. We’ve never put much money into marketing. It’s more honest. It’s about the product being the hero, rather than a glam ad campaign.”

From left: Alex, Sylvie and Olivia

The brand has eliminated parabens and removed them from almost all their products. Furthermore, Alex and Sylvie are very interested in starting another company that is 100% paraben-free. “…starting fresh, not reformulating everything that we currently have and changing people’s world,” says Alex. “Changing a foundation is a really big deal. We’re looking at making a whole new line that is paraben-free and uses recycled materials for packaging. We would show people the transparency of where things are coming from and where they are going back to. That was very much my mom’s initial purpose. She felt like women needed and expected better products. She wanted to make things that weren’t lying to them. She thought women should demand more, and she offered that to them in the beginning. It’s a natural evolution that people are now asking more from their products and wanting them to be more natural. My mom’s always been at the forefront of that.”

Sylvie's holistic approach to skincare has been passed down to her children, who gloriously lead by example. Olivia is a dynamic contributor to several New York City charities, and Alex, who also looks after the brand’s spas, passionately engages in environmental causes such as ocean conservation and fish sustainability, which has led her to be closely involved in the company’s philanthropic efforts.

“My mom is someone who is super spiritual and who is into the idea that everything has energy and life, even plants,” says Alex. “That’s been very much the evolution of our philanthropic efforts. In the very beginning at the company’s development 11 years ago, my mother wanted to ultimately grow it to the point where we could have a philanthropic arm, a grant or a foundation. We’re still growing the brand in order to be able to afford that kind of thing, but what we thought we could do are small seasonal collections. The more we get educated, the more shocked we are by the urgency of these situations that we want to share them with the clients.”

Chantecaille’s colourful charity-based eye compact collections have long become sought-after must-have items, and women around the globe are waiting patiently for the next collection to launch in spring. Previous collections have included Les Papillons, from which 5% of all sales went to the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Foundation, Le Corail and Protected Paradise, which both supported the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, Le Tigre which benefitted TRAFFIC, and La Baleine, which rose awareness for the endangered blue whales. The upcoming spring collection will most probably focus on dolphins, even though each member of the family favours a different animal.

Protected Paradise

“Corals are being depleted by the increased temperature, but they are also being ruined by trawling,” explains Alex. “Complete ecosystems are being ravished. The death and destruction of the ecosystem of the coral reef was a bi-product, as the initial focus of the trawling is the fish. We were told that we’re just taking out all the fish out of the ocean. Nobody knew this four years ago. Everybody in New York was eating Chilean sea bass and bluefin tuna. We would rarely think about the source of fish. Maybe we discussed mercury, but that was it. We think so much about the free-range chicken, and if the beef is really naturally grass-fed. We forget about how we’re farming the fish and that we’re feeding them with antibiotics. We’re genetically modifying them, and we’re totally depleting them.”

“When they’re collecting shrimp and they drop a net, it’s totally indiscriminate. If they want to get one shrimp from the bottom, they will take everything. People don’t think about that when they order a shrimp cocktail with four shrimps. They should visualize the death of all these animals. They just shove the rest off the boat; star fish, tuna, sharks, dolphins, turtles… this amazing amount of life that lives in a really intricate way down there that we just completely disrespect and ignore the value of.”

Even though Alex is very ambitious and dedicated to spreading the message. She clearly states that she isn’t trying to tell people to change, but to be more aware.

“We’re chasing the fish to distinction. It’s almost like we need some international legislation to protect some swathes of land that are endemically important for certain species. There are always areas that are super unique and important that, if we don’t protect them, the earth (which is 70% ocean) will look like a desert, because we’ve literally scraped it clean. They are pulling things up that scientists have never seen before, and they just throw it back down again. I think it’s a question of education.”

Not long ago celebrities have started to ban famous high-end restaurants that still serve the critically endangered bluefin tuna, something that will hopefully “trickle down to the people in general.” Alex is convinced that you need both, top-level people, to make it really effective and unsexy, and then general awareness. “We try to show people the facts and try to educate women, because there is a lot of power the woman has and how she spends her money. If you don’t know about it, you can’t care about it. If you don’t care about it, you can’t protect it.”

Vivienne Tang