On Slowness . A letter from our Founder

I left the beauty industry because it had forgotten how to wait.

Everything ran on the calendar of attention. New launches in eight weeks, refresh in six, sell-through in four. The pace of the work and the pace of the product were the same pace, and that pace had nothing to do with the rose.

A Damask Rose opens once a year, in May, in a valley in Morocco where the air smells like the inside of a prayer. The pickers begin before sunrise so the petals do not lose their water to the heat. By the time the sun is up the day’s harvest is already over. You cannot rush this. The flower is not interested in your deadline.

I started ETHERNAL because I wanted to build something at the pace of the petal. Not at the pace of the market, not at the pace of the algorithm, not even at the pace of the customer who, like all of us, has been trained to want the next thing before she has finished the present one.

So we slow infuse. Months, not minutes. The petals enter a carrier of jojoba and sweet almond on the Mediterranean coast of Spain and they stay there until the oil is no longer oil but a memory of the flower the petal used to be.

This is what the halo is, I think. It is not perfume. It is the time the petal took, given back to you on the skin, slowly, all day.

I am writing this because I want to say something honest about slowness that the wellness conversation has made it almost impossible to say. Slowness is not a self-care practice. It is not a marketing posture. It is not even a virtue. It is the only condition under which certain things, certain real things, can occur. The infusion is one of those things. The halo is one of those things. You, returning to yourself, are one of those things.

Beauty cannot be bought. It is the frequency of who you are.

I built ETHERNAL so that nothing about the product, the bottle, the ritual, the relationship, would ever ask you to be faster than the rose. Two products. One Inner Circle. As many ROSE DROPS as the year asks for and no more.

If you have been holding the oil in your palm for a moment before you apply it, the way some of you have written to me about, you are already doing the work. The work is letting the matter be matter and the ether be ether and not confusing the two.

What is eternal is not what remains. What is eternal is what was never matter to begin with.

Slowly,

Giselle