How the founder of luxury beauty brand Chantecaille ensures women are supported and celebrated every day

Botanical beauty pioneer Chantecaille, a women-founded and led company, ensures the empowerment and celebration of women is at the forefront of all that it does - from the female conservationists around the world it partners with to the customers it creates natural products for.

Sylvie Chantecaille, the trailblazing leader of the eponymous brand, launched the company more than 20 years ago after moving to New York City from her birthplace of Paris with a background in art history and theatre.

Sylvie created her first beauty company with none other than Diane von Furstenberg, before recognising a gap in the market for a brand that embraced natural, botanical formulas with science-backed technology. While natural ingredients are wildly popular today, Sylvie remembers a time when the concept wasn’t on the collective radar - and when she had to push for the shift.

As we celebrate women, and recognise all the work that still needs to be done to achieve equality this International Women’s Day, Sylvie has reflected on her own experience as a businesswoman in a man’s world, as well as her accomplishments, her dedication to using her platform for change, and her hopes for the future generations.

According to Sylvie, at Chantecaille, and in her own life, “every day is about women, every day is International Women’s Day”.

As a brand founder, conservation leader, and beauty trailblazer, Sylvie knew from day one that she wanted Chantecaille to be a platform that would “assist, inform, educate and celebrate the value, needs, and strength of women”. And as a businesswoman, she has dedicated her career to employing, celebrating and uplifting women through natural beauty products and a dedication to sustainability.

While the majority of top management positions at Chantecaille are held by women, Sylvie remembers when she worked for large beauty corporations before starting her line in 1997, it was “always men at the top, men in charge”.

“As a woman, I could be creative, but not in control,” she recalls to The Independent. “At the end of the day, the men made the ultimate decisions on everything. So I left and launched Chantecaille.”

Inspired by her love of flowers and gardening, interest in traditional Chinese medicine, holistic methods and natural ingredients, and her appreciation for all things beautiful, Sylvie knew that she wanted to create a brand that incorporated the various beneficial properties of botanicals.

“It definitely wasn’t a popular choice at the time, but it was obvious to me that we all deserved something healthier and better for our beauty products than what was on the market,” she tells us. “I felt strongly that beauty needed to be natural - but also effective, scientific and luxurious at the same time. Finding a way to tie science into these botanicals was key, and the proof is in the results.”

When Chantecaille launched, it did so as a fragrance brand, with four scents based on natural essential oils. Sylvie recalls being in Grasse, France, sourcing ingredients for fragrances with her daughter, Olivia, when she happened upon a field of rose de mai blooms. After speaking with the farmer who cultivated the fields, she realised the flowers could become ingredients that could then be implemented into skincare. As Chantecaille expanded to skincare and makeup created from natural ingredients, the rose became iconic to the brand.

But according to Sylvie, at the time, customers barely acknowledged the ingredients that went into Chantecaille’s products, as they cared more about “how amazing the formulas were, and how effective they were”.

“What made us such a success was that our products felt better than anything on the market, and when women realised that, they told their sisters, their mothers, their friends and we grew,” Sylvie recalls.

While the brand has grown to be associated with luxury makeup and skincare, it still sells its popular fragrances, including Sylvie’s favourite, Darby Rose, a scent inspired by the founder’s favourite garden rose.

Although Chantecaille’s main focus has always been on celebrating the natural and individual beauty of its customers through products such as its Future Skin foundation, which allow women to feel their best, but “still like themselves,” another impactful way Chantecaille supports women is through its dedication to sustainability and conservation. The brand becomes the bridge between its customers, who are eager to make a difference, and the many conservation groups working at the front line of animal and environmental issues.

In addition to trailblazing a space for the emergence of natural beauty products, Chantecaille has spent more than a decade working with organisations that prioritise and raise awareness of urgent environmental causes, and with the “incredible” women who work in conservation, who, as Sylvie says, “seem to always find the most creative and successful solutions for the threats animals face”.

The brand released its first conservation collection in 2006. Since then, it has grown the number of Chantecaille products that benefit charity to 53 and counting, and, as a result, has donated $3m to conservation groups, many of which are female-led.

“Leading a brand has opened my eyes to the exciting possibility that there was a way to use my day job for a cause I was so passionate about,” Sylvie shares. “We have been supporting conservation causes that work to protect endangered species, plants, oceans and issues surrounding global sustainability ever since.”

Chantecaille’s dedication to sustainability is also built into the brand’s ethos, as Sylvie says the company doesn’t “take more than we need from our planet” and is always looking for “ways to be lighter on the earth”.

Chantecaille is known for its use of plant stem cells, which are grown in labs rather than fields. The process not only yields an extremely potent ingredient but also requires significantly less water than the amount required to grow, harvest and transform plants into ingredients.

These plant stem cells are what help create the brand’s renowned skincare line. Products such as Sylvie’s favourite, the Gold Recovery Intense Concentrate AM/PM Serum, incorporate cutting-edge ingredients like the new Gold Heptapeptide and combine them with plant stem cells and scientifically-backed vegan ingredients.

When the brand does work with ingredients sourced directly from the earth, it does so through sustainable plant farmers and organisations which give back to local communities, support female workers, and ensure ingredients are obtained responsibly.

The company’s conservation efforts are a “logical extension,” Sylvie says. “If you care about saving the earth, you must give back to it. We make sure that we make the least impact possible. We constantly look for female-led conservation groups in the field, working to save animals in need and environmental crises to bring awareness to, and to support alongside our clients.”

Sylvie isn’t just a pioneer in conservation and sustainability, as her accomplishments also extend to her personal life, which saw her juggle her impressive career with parenthood.

According to Sylvie, whose three children Olivia, Alex, and Philippe, work for Chantecaille as the creative director, vice president of sales and promotions, and director of photography and media, respectively, raising her children while growing the business has been one of the accomplishments she’s most proud of.

“Really I’m proudest to see my children grow into such incredibly capable, independent and talented adults - and to get to see that firsthand every day as we work together,” she says.

Looking to the future, Sylvie says the brand will continue to “empower women to see the natural beauty within themselves” by creating products that “give them the confidence” to “do their best, feel their best”.

“When you feel good, it affects all that you do,” she says.