ELLE Romania- BEAUTY ROYALTY: JAMI MORSE HEIDEGGER, Kiehl’s pioneer and founder of Retrouvé

Jami Morse Heidegger by Francesco Carrozzini

SHE REPRESENTS THE THIRD GENERATION OF THE FAMILY THAT FOUNDED THE MODERN-DAY KIEHL’S BRAND. JAMI MORSE HEIDEGGER TALKS ABOUT RETROUVÉ, HER NEW LINE OF LUXURY SKINCARE PRODUCTS WITH POTENT FORMULAS AND EFFICIENT INGREDIENTS, ABOUT HER LIFE-LONG JOURNEY THROUGH THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY, AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS SHE HAS WITNESSED ALONG THE WAY.

BY: DORIS SANGEORZAN

QUOTE 1:

“I have always said that our product is only as good as the ingredients that are in it, and not only as good as the ingredients that are in it, but also as good as the ingredients that are not in it, and not only that, but as good as the concentration of the ingredients.”

QUOTE 2:

“A little bit of exfoliation is good for the skin, but when people are using one acid on top of another, on top of a scrub, on top of a laser- that can be very damaging to the skin. So, everything has its place and role, and I think that now people are more concerned with preserving the skin’s natural balance.”

QUOTE 3:

„We really just try to launch products either when they are ready, or when we see something that’s a niche in the market or white space, if you will, something that no one is offering yet and that could be helpful.”

TEXT:

A conversation with Jami Morse Heidegger is a fascinating expedition into the historical universe of the Kiehl’s brand, and of the family that founded it and built it until Jami sold it to L’Oréal in 2000. Although she never thought that she would return to the industry, in 2014 she came back with the Retrouvé brand, whose products are partially made with ingredients grown on the permaculture farm founded by her husband in Malibu.

Jami’s story begins with her grandfather, who immigrated from Russia and started working as a child for John Kiehl, a German who owned the namesake apothecary in New York.

Her grandfather went on to study pharmacology, and bought the store from John Kiehl in 1921. Jami’s father grew up in that environment, founded Morse Laboratories, and then developed the modern skincare line, but the debut of Kiehl’s meant ointments and poultices and formulas that have been used for hundreds of years.

Following her parents’ divorce, Jami spent more time in her father’s store, where he also created essential oils and fragrances. ”Unbeknownst to my mother, who wasn’t around much because she was working in the film industry and she was usually away on sets, I would go to Kiehl’s and help my dad and my grandfather, who both worked there. I would learn new things and make a mess and mischief, and I liked to make my own experiments in the back. I started when I was four years old, and as far back as I can remember I was at Kiehl’s, that was my playland. The other thing I loved was pressing the buttons on the cash register.”

Later on, Jami attended Harvard, married Klaus Heidegger, who is Austrian and an alpine skier who was a world champion, and she moved to Austria. When her father got sick with cancer and told her that he intended to sell the company, Jami returned to the US to help him. Klaus joined them when he retired from his sports career, working in manufacturing and finance, while Jami handled product development and the aspects that had to do with the customers front-facing. They raised their eldest daughter, Nicoletta, in the same spirit. „From her point of view, I’m sorry that we ended up selling the company, because that was the legacy and the heritage she was looking forward to inherit when she grew up, and she was old enough to understand what was going on. My twins were too young, they didn’t really know, but Nicoletta had spent so much time there, lived in New York with us and was at the store daily, so it was a loss for her personally that we didn’t have Kiehl’s anymore, because she already had great plans in her mind regarding the products and the things that she wanted to make as well. But after we sold Kiehl’s in 2000-2001 to L’Oréal, I stayed on as president, and kept working for a while. At the same time, I was raising my twins, and they were not very well, so we couldn’t travel around with them the way that we did when we had only Nicoletta. We determined that we needed to stay just in California, and not be going to New York or wherever else for business, so I retired, and we pretty much settled in Los Angeles. We loved being here full-time and I was looking forward to retirement. We also had a long non-compete, which is very important in the industry because you can’t make a new Kiehl’s right away or anything like that, so I never thought of coming back into the industry. I had worked very hard from a very young age, and Klaus and I didn’t really take vacations or things like that, and our life was really centered around Kiehl’s, therefore I was happy to just raise my children and be a mom. But after about a month, my husband, being a competitive person all his life, did not want to be retired anymore, so he started to do some business things in other fields, because it couldn’t be anything related to skincare. And all the while, I was making products for myself, because I wanted the best that I could possibly have for my own skin,” Jami tells me.

THE BEGINNINGS OF RETROUVÉ

While at Kiehl’s, Jami had to create products that were accessible in terms of price, and which are still some of the most popular skincare products in the world. But she wanted the ones she conceived for herself to be as concentrated as possible, with high percentages and no concern for the price. “I knew that having high percentages of vitamin C, A, etc. could be very helpful for the skin in the long-term, and, likewise, having high concentrations of oils, which was not popular in the US either,” Jami says. She knew that because she had noticed that in Europe, and especially in the Alps, the women there would use a lot of oil on their skin, and this helped to keep it moisturized, and they didn’t mind having that kind of glow from the oil. But in the US, everyone wanted to be very matte, and if you had even the tiniest bit of oil, you had to dry it up right away, she explains. The makeup also needed to look very matte, and that may or may not look better on camera, she points out, but it’s certainly not better for the skin. “Having spent so much time in Europe, and doing all the research that we have done, we had always had our products based on squalane, a hydrating oil which is very similar to the components in human sebum produced by the skin, as well as on other emollient ingredients, and, when I created the Retrouvé products, I really wanted to up the level of concentration of the squalane from their compositions, in order to create products that were moisturizing enough for my lifestyle, especially after I had three children and I entered my 40s, when you start to have hormonal dryness, and considering that I was spending a lot of time skiing and practicing outdoor sports, so I knew that my skin needed more oil than was in most of the products that I found on the market,” adds Jami.

While she was raising her children, she tried to find skincare products that lived up to her standards, but most of them contained fragrances and artificial colors, and Jami did not want to put on her skin synthetic fragrances and chemical ingredients that were potentially cancerogenic, or parabens. She continued to work with the chemist with whom she has been collaborating for decades to create products just for herself.

 „I was a full-time mom, and I also had an equine lifestyle magazine at the time because my daughters were equestrians. I also had time to be on boards of universities and different things that I wouldn’t have had time for earlier, so I spent a lot of time in philanthropy, and traveling with my children to their horse shows and to different activities that they had. I was very busy, but still vain, and I wanted my skin to look as good as possible. Additionally, I had the challenge that, because my daughters were both equestrians and I wanted to be with them, we would go to all the places in the US where they had the national horse shows and the top shows, which were generally held in very sunny and dry areas like Palm Beach in Florida, and out here in Palm Desert, and that’s the Desert Circuit, as they call it. So I was constantly in the sun, which I didn’t love, as well as in these often dry environments, and therefore I had to take even better care of my skin. Also, when I was younger I was a ski racer, I was used to skiing all the time since I was a child, and, of course, then you are at higher altitudes where you have more effect from the sun with the diminishing ozone layer, as well as the reflection of the snow, so I’d spend years skiing and we didn’t even know about sunscreen really when I was a child, hence I had years of that kind of exposure. For this reason, I also wanted to include elements of natural ingredients in my products that could help to, as much as possible, undo the damage that I had created by being in the sun so much, and to help to prevent further harm, because there are ingredients that help prevent sun damage. Then, additionally, after the damage had already been done, I wanted to create this moisturizing kind of balm for my skin to help really treat it and keep it as anti-aging as possible for as long as possible, to find solutions for my skin to look good, but also to be protected by being safety-conscious, by using sunscreens and those sorts of things as well, and that is how I came up with this regimen for my skin,” expounds Jami, who adds that she is a big proponent not only of sunscreens, but also of using sunglasses, hats, scarves, turtlenecks, and any other protective resources.

Jami started sharing samples of the products created by her and for her with the people on the equestrian circuit, and with her friends and acquaintances who were complimenting her skin. Also, her husband took some samples to Austria and gave them to his VIP friends over there, and they started to use them and liked them so much that, after their non-compete clause with L’Oréal expired, Klaus told Jami that he would like to make a business of this, instead of just giving away free samples to everyone. “And I said to him ‘Absolutely not! No way, I’m never going back into business, I want to be a mom,’” she confesses.  But they eventually reached an understanding. “Klaus said ‘Well, you just create and make the products, and I’ll take care of all the rest,’” Jami tells me frankly. “So that’s how Retrouvé was really born, and we started around 2013-2014, when we introduced the products in Europe, for a number of reasons,” she acknowledges. “First of all, my husband is Austrian and, having been a world champion ski racer, a lot of people knew him there, he’d been on a lot of TV shows and he’d written a book, an autobiography that was on the best-seller list. So people would ask him ‘What are you doing now?’, and he started to mention maybe bringing the cosmetics out, and there was a lot of interest as a result of that. The second reason was that when I mentioned it [Retrouvé] to anyone really in the States, someone who was maybe an editor with a magazine, their first question was ‘Well, how does it differ from Kiehl’s?’ Everyone wanted to talk about Kiehl’s, and I didn’t want to talk about Kiehl’s really other than to say, ‘I love Kiehl’s, and Kiehl’s is my baby and my family and my heritage and my legacy, but this is something different’, and it really is very different,” she emphasizes. “Retrouvé is also a different price point, not because we purposely tried to create luxury products, but because I didn’t even look at their costs. It was not until Klaus went to try to establish the appropriate prices for them that we both realized how expensive they were,” Jami admits. “I was just looking at what helps my skin. I was not looking at the costs, it was just for myself. Thus, we hoped that if we went to Europe and launched the Retrouvé products there first, not everyone there knew Kiehl’s, or they didn’t know me as Kiehl’s, so we wouldn’t have to talk about Kiehl’s. And thirdly, a lot of people knew me in the industry, and I said, ‘Look, if it doesn’t work, we just go there, we put a toe in the water and, at worst, we have 5000 extra products for ourselves and for our friends, and we can start small.’”

They launched Retrouvé in Paris, where Jami tells me the line was very well-received. “We had such a beautiful reception from the top editors, magazines and from people in the press and media in Paris. They liked the products a lot, and that gave me some confidence,” Jami says. This positive feedback inspired her and her husband to also target the Germanic countries, where her husband Klaus was well-known, and that is how they entered the markets in Switzerland, Germany, and, of course, in Austria. And after about two years, when they saw that people were interested, and that customers would come back to buy the products, they launched Retrouvé on the US market as well,  in two stores, one of which was Bergdorf Goodman, and the other was Ron Robinson, which is a store run by friends of Jami’s in Los Angeles. The line is also available now in the Summer Colony Living stores from the Palm Desert area in California (https://summercolonyliving.com/) , and, in Romania, they can be ordered through Net-a-Porter (https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-us/).

“We are a small company, self-financed, so we did not want to come out with too many SKUs- at Kiehl’s, we had so many products. At Retrouvé, I am trying to bring out products that I am not seeing on the market, products that are not out there, that at least I have found or can buy,” Jami explains.

An example of this viewpoint and direction Jami envisioned for the Retrouvé brand is the Intensive Replenishing Facial Moisturizer, one of the line’s most popular products, which has a formula and a concept that perfectly represent the principles based on which Jami, along with the chemists she collaborates with, has created the line’s products, which reflect to a great degree the knowledge she has inherited from her grandfather and from her father, and her vast experience in the industry. Even the brand’s name suggests its mission: Retrouvé means found again, redefined, returned, as if an allusion to her break from the industry, and to her return in a very authentic manner, without compromise when it comes to quality. The products contain the most valuable, efficient and potent ingredients, in an unusually high concentrations, and the professionalism with which they are mixed reminds one of the valuable combinations encapsulated by her grandfather and her father in bottles and boxes whose goal was not to attract through their shapes, colors, or ornaments. Their innovations live on through Jami, whose stake is not her company’s commercial success- an experience she has already had- but rather its performance. That is why she does not impose deadlines for new launches, does not seem to compare Retrouvé with other brands, or to be interested in what the competition is doing.

I tested the Retrouvé products, and they convinced me that they indeed deserve the gold medal for quality. All the lotions have a particular texture, so distinctive that I would recognize it with my eyes closed. It is semi-liquid, viscous, even gelatinous, but at the same time light and silky, as well as odorless (Jami says that fragrances can dehydrate or irritate the skin and can become phototoxic in contact with the sun), and colorless (Jami believes that a skincare product should have the color of its ingredients).

Even the packaging of the brand’s products aligns itself with their characteristics. „The black packaging that we ended up choosing really is something that my husband had input in, and that people of all genders feel comfortable with, since the line is unisex, and it’s just something that we hope is luxurious, elegant and chic,” asserts Jami. “But, more importantly, we chose the packaging not just because we like the color, but also because the black color insulates the ingredients from the damaging effects of the light and of the sun, which really do break down a lot of the key ingredients, so why put them in high concentrations if you are going to have them in clear packaging, in which they are basically just going to disintegrate or oxidize?” Jami stresses. “For that reason, we chose the black packaging, and we chose the glass, because, through this and the airless nature of the packaging, which is airless in the pump as well as in the bottle, and in order to do that we are creating the products under vacuum, under nitrogen, so that you don’t get the air in, because the air and the light oxidize and break down the products. In this way, we can keep the products with a good shelf life for longer, but we could also use fewer preservatives, to keep the products better for longer and less chemical elements- less of any of that is generally a good thing. It is a costly system to manufacture that way, it involves a lot more labor, it is more time-intensive, it is heavy, and the packaging is of course more expensive to do that way, but it has a purpose, and that is not only to look the way that it does, which we like and we are so glad that people like it too, but the main goal is really the function: trying to preserve this expensive creation that we’ve made, and to keep it as effective as possible for as long as possible for our customer,” Jami points out. “We want other people to be able to experience the same efficacy and purity of product over a certain amount of time, that’s why we went to great lengths to put it in this airless system.”

ON THE EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY TRENDS AND THE HISTORY OF THE INDUSTRY

I ask Jami how she thinks the industry has evolved over the course of her career. “It’s interesting, and I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way, but I think that so many people have copied us, what we did at Kiehl’s, and what we are now doing at Retrouvé, and that’s been a big trend in the industry, which has moved more towards natural, towards eliminating artificial coloration, fragrances and parabens,” confesses Jami. “This whole concept of ‘clean beauty’, which we don’t even claim to be, because there is no definition of it, has become a big trend, but all of that is really something that we started at Kiehl’s. And other people, who maybe did not value it before, now that society is changing, they’re changing. Another thing that we always did very much at Kiehl’s, which we do at Retrouvé as well, was the whole clinical approach, looking at cosmetics more clinically. Before, they were appreciated if they were more flowery, or smelled good, not so much just for what they were really doing for the skin,” she continues, “and we always explained at Kiehl’s that our product is only as good as the ingredients that are in it, and not only as good as the ingredients that are in it, but also as good as the ingredients that are not in it, and not only that, but as good as the concentration of the ingredients. For example, a lot of people will say that they have created a Vitamin C cream, but if you look at the label, Vitamin C, in the US at least, has to go according to the concentration, to the percentage of the ingredient in the product. So if Vitamin C is the second to last ingredient, there’s probably not a lot in there, and you approach buying the product thinking it is going to do all these things, but if it is not in the product at the clinically-validated level, where if you have 5% (that’s when you try to treat wrinkles), if you have it at .2%, you can still say there is Vitamin C in there, but it is not at a high enough level of concentration to do what you think it is going to do, so this whole idea of approaching things more clinically, it is something that we started at Kiehl’s as well,” concludes Jami.

The education of the consumer is another trend launched by Kiehl’s, more specifically by Jami and by Cathleen Klemm, who is now executive director at Retrouvé. Together, they created newsletters and informative brochures, and encouraged people to read the labels on the products, to ask questions, to know what they are applying on their skin, discussions which have now become common in the industry.

In terms of the organic trend, Jami is embracing and reserved at the same time: “Now, the idea of organic is wonderful, but there are certain cases in which synthetic ingredients can be as good as, or better, and sometimes more efficient, than the all-natural ingredients, so we do not espouse the philosophy that all-organic, all-green and natural, words that don’t necessarily have a definition, are better. We have to remember that arsenic and poisons, those are all-natural as well, and you would not want to be ingesting them or putting them on your skin, so there is a balance to that. It is important to understand, and to have some knowledge of what the ingredients actually are,” declares Jami.

She is also reserved when it comes to using essential oils on a large scale, which she considers positive in general, and which she reminds me it was initiated by her grandfather in the 20s. “I do believe that a lot of the oils are actually very strong, and some of them should not be mixed together at high concentrations and applied on the face, because they are very potent and can be irritating. They are basically medicine, so it is important to know about these things, and I do think that education is becoming much more crucial, because the consumer wants to learn, to know, and especially now with the presence of social media, of TikTok and of Google,  there is so much information that people have at their fingertips. Therefore, companies have to be more on their toes, to make sure that they are staying abreast of what the customer wants and needs, because the customer is getting much savvier. But all of this is what we tried to encourage from the very beginning at Kiehl’s, and even more so now at Retrouvé. So, it has been really gratifying to see these changes, and I think they are really for the best for the consumer.”

The concept of sampling also originated at Kiehl’s, says Jami (“I did not know of companies that were doing samples, gifts with purchases, and things that we were doing already in the 60s”), as well as the tendency to be socially conscious and involved. „That is something that, again, we very much pioneered at Kiehl’s. To my knowledge, we are one of the first companies that did percentages of, and even 100% of the sales of the product proceeds to go to charities back in the 1980s and 90s. We also had our Hand Care for a Cure that benefited amfAR at the beginning of the AIDS pandemic, so we have been doing this kind of thing for a long time, but we were alone, and now so many companies are giving percentages back which is wonderful, and we applaud it,” adds Jami. She tells me that, at Retrouvé, she implemented the program “Every Skin Has a Story,” which celebrates creatives of color and their stories, and that the brand gave a part of proceeds of sales to medical research for The First Responders Fund during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Another current trend is the idea of gentleness and balance on the skin. I am so happy to see this coming into the fore, because I think we got a little sidetracked with all these acids,” Jami says to me. “A little bit of exfoliation is good for the skin, but when people are using one acid on top of another, on top of a scrub ,on top of a laser, all that can be very damaging to the skin, and you also end up thinning the surface of the skin, which can lead to premature aging. Everything has its place and role, and I think that now people are more concerned with preserving the natural balance, the protective barrier and the layers in the skin, and try to support what the skin does naturally to help protect itself. That is a lot of what we are doing at Retrouvé, and trying to explain to people too,” she emphasizes.

Jami professes to me that she is a big believer in traditional European facials, and that her aesthetician, Cristiana Schneider, is originally from Romania. Cristiana is also one of Jami’s closest friends, who has helped her for over than 30 years with the development of her products, Jami tells me. In addition, Cristiana has created a Retrouvé facial that she gives to her customers in Los Angeles, and she is her daughter’s godmother. Jami adds that, also because of Cristiana, she is aware of all the treatments that are currently popular in Romania, which confirm her belief that sometimes the newest and most efficient products, ingredients and treatments are actually the oldest ones. Like muds and sulfur treatments, Jami remarks. “I also like to constantly try all the products from there, and to keep abreast of skincare things from that country. Romania still is, for me, the top standard in skincare,” Jami states , “and Cristiana brings me back a few lines that are only available in Romania, where she goes all the time, so I am always trying products from there and I can actually understand their labels and descriptions because I speak French and a little bit of Italian, and the Romanian language is similar. But your country and your people are generally far more educated and experienced with skincare, even, as you mentioned, if they are not wealthy, they just have much more understanding of this field because it is part of their culture growing up.” She adds that many aestheticians with whom she works and consults in the US, to whom she gives products for them to use on their customers, and who give her feedback on the products, most of them are from Romania.

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT

I am curious how Jami sees the future of Retrouvé. She reveals to me that, this year, they have slated to launch about four products, for which they have to finalize only the packaging. One of them is the lip balm. “The lip balm I have used historically is our Retrouvé eye concentrate that I love so much and which is, again, a unique product on the marketplace, and one that I just adore and that has probably been one of our top sellers over the years on average. But I like to use it on my lips as well, as do many other people. And since it was so popular, and everyone was using it on their lips too, we said that we want to give everyone the lip treatment of Retrouvé. But, because basically when you put something on your lips you’re eating it, it’s something that you are ingesting, we wanted to take out anything that we didn’t necessarily want people to be ingesting, yet keep with that same kind of moisturizing, silky, easily spreadable feel, so that’s the genesis of our lip balm.” Besides the lip balm, among the other products that will be launched in 2022 are a face oil and a mask.

She tells me that many of the products are made up of ingredients raised on the permaculture farm “Palms of Malibu,” founded by her husband. Currently, the avocado fruits grown there represent the main ingredient of the Retrouvé products, but Klaus also cultivates lavender, coriander, sage, marshmallow, thyme, yarrow, nettle, rosemary, and pomegranate, which he also intends to use as product components. The avocado is especially important because, Jami explains, “the avocado oil we use is so wonderful for the skin: it is moisturizing, it is soothing, it is nourishing and it also contains high amounts of sterolin, which is an ingredient that helps diminish in a natural way the dark spots caused by aging. We were already using avocado oil even in Kiehl’s products, but it is a very expensive ingredient to get the natural pressed avocado and the avocado oil and the extract, so, instead of buying it, like we did at Kiehl’s, we decided we would press our own extracts from the avocados, and we started doing that. Now we sell the avocados as well to the health food markets, and to some of the top restaurateurs in the area who like to use them, to purchase them for cooking, because they really taste different, they have such a buttery smoothness to them, and they contain so many more nutrients that are high in concentration. So they really do make a difference, and that is why they are so popular.”

„Retrouvé is therefore still a small family business and, although we have had offers from other companies interested in investing and in partnering, for now we are trying to decide if, when and how we want to grow, we are just trying to do everything ourselves, and to keep tightly to our original objective and intention, which was really to provide the finest quality products that we could and that are otherwise not available in the marketplace,” explains Jami.

Her daughter, Hannah, has joined the company, becoming the fourth generation to enter the family business, so she will take its values and principles into the future. At 25, Hannah worked for Retrouvé during the summer following her university graduation, where she studied European history. She planned to further her education in Europe, but the pandemic determined her to stay in the US. Initially, she handled the company’s European accounts, then she became Global Training Director, and now she is the VP of the company.

„We decided that she has a different point of view from me, “Jami says. First of all, Hannah spearheaded the Retrouvé education and training program. “Then, like her entire generation, she is very connected to social media, to influencers,” Cathleen Klemm adds. Hannah is involved in everything related to the digital part of the business, including updating Retrouvé’s official website, in order to open it internationally during the first part of 2023, which will allow people from all over the world to place orders online. „ We are very grateful to have Hannah help, and it’s exciting because I have always felt very bad about taking Kiehl’s away especially from my older daughter Nicoletta, but also from my twins, and this way perhaps, one day, we still can fulfill that legacy of working together in a family business in some way, and of somehow passing it down. But now Hannah is the fourth generation in our family working together with us. My son Max is a basketball player playing in Germany right now but, when he retires, he is interested in finance so he’d like to come and work with us, and my eldest daughter, Nicoletta, 31, is a therapist and she loves what she does, so she’s not really interested in cosmetics at the moment, she kind of goes in the opposite direction, but maybe one day she’ll be interested in joining the family business, who knows?” Jami muses. “At least we like the idea that we are trying to continue the tradition that we have had, and I still love teaching them. I find things all the time from my father that he has written about herbs and cosmetics and all those things that I just love to share with my children, so I’m hopeful that perhaps one day we can all work together”.   

SMALL GUIDE OF RETROUVÉ PRODUCTS

The Retrouvé line consists of seven face products and two body ones. The most popular of them are:

Intensive Replenishing Facial Moisturizer is a symbolical product, one of Retrouvé’s two top bestsellers, which represents the brand’s principles and development process. Jami worked for 15 years to find the formula that confers it a multifunctional character. Based on squalane and a pharmaceutical-grade cholesterol ester, it also includes vitamin C, vegetable oils, apple stem cells, white tea, and it is a favorite of celebrities like Zoë Kravitz, Ashley Graham, Tracee Ellis Ross and Mandy Moore.

Revitalizing Eye Concentrate Skin Hydrator, created for the delicate skin around the eyes, is the other Retrouvé bestseller, and it has a formula also based on squalane, enriched with vitamin E, peptides, resveratrol, vitamin C in a liquid form, along with cholesterol, many vegetable oils and aloe vera. It gives the skin an elevated level of hydration, softness, brightness, it diminishes depigmentation, smooths out wrinkles, and its texture is a perfect base for other cosmetic and makeup products. Dita von Teese says that she is dependent on it.

Luminous Cleansing Elixir is a cleansing product which does not contain water, has a humectant character and that ultra-concentrated, oily texture characteristic of the Retrouvé line. The basis of its formula is made up of avocado, under the form of oil and extract, and of glycerin. It works on every type of skin, but it is ideal for sensitive skin, which can be irritated by a more profound and drying cleansing lotion, for dry skin, which needs products with a higher emollient level, and for mature skin, which has a lower level of natural hydration than younger skin. Demi Moore, who has very sensitive skin, is a fan.  

Baume Ultime, the body oil launched in 2019, is one of Jami’s favorite products (“We wanted to give the sensitive body skin the same sumptuous treatment that we created for the facial skin.”), and the brand’s third bestseller. Formulated with avocado oil (49%) and extracts grown on the farm owned by Klaus, with vegan squalane, plus antioxidants like vitamin E (5%) and vitamin C (5%), it is recommended by the iconic supermodel Beverly Johnson, who considers it “the best body oil I have ever had. It’s thick, it’s luxurious and it lasts.”  

Dermal Defense Hand Cream, launched during the pandemic, when caring for the hands’ skin became vital, is formulated with avocado oil and panthenol- both ingredients soothe and moisturize dry skin. It also includes a multitude of marine extracts, bakuchiol, niacinamide and vitamin C.