We know that luxury is the achievement of extravagant desires and highlights a materialistic world which is never satisfied. Pure insignificance? Useless? Luxury is, for some people, a pleasure and a way to let things go; a way to escape the world’s sometimes rough reality that we don’t always want to see. Sometimes filled with a sadness and precariousness that can darken the daily life of many people, where distance creates indifference and a comfortable self-sufficiency.
Some will say that luxury is a product of rare or extreme quality and therefore justifies an exorbitant price. Is that necessarily fair? Can we ethically accept that the major part of the price never reaches the people who worked hard for that moment of magic and dreaming which is what creates the luxury? Do they only touch luxury briefly while creating this moment of magic?
We’ve met a woman who knows how to share, invests inhuman beings, and transcends the material value of the luxury item to confer onit a sort of ‘soul’. It’s a mission beyond its “simple”superior quality or craftsmanship and only a woman with her inspiring passion could realize a dream like this and transform a luxury into an act of humanity and ethics.
Pauline Burgener touched us in her quest of beauty and responsible well-being. She spreads good by seeing both the hand that picks the plant and the eyes of someone who seems to cultivate indefatigably these divine flowers. She engages herself in women’s causes and supports associations that teach women how to run a business or learn a skill for a job, and grants micro-credits to foster the creation of local small business. She buys them then delicately produces an essential oil, at fair price. Her work extends from India to Morocco and into the Middle East. She shares her passion, her know-how, creates links between people to encourage and develop opportunities for women using local entrepreneurship, shows respect of others and their skills by protecting local land exploitation. These are some o fthe values which Doctor Burgener tries to honour during the entire supply chain.
It is in the wonderful world of soft scents and abundance that Doctor Pauline Burgener has worked for 20 years to make the dream of a better, more beautiful world by fighting daily to give luxury with ethics.
Pauline Burgener, Doctor of Biology, has dedicated her life to create unique products that benevolently anticipate the desires of a clientele. Doctor Burgener is driven by her passion to discover, transform and restore the miracles which the nature offers us.
She travels the world to find the specific and pure ingredients while using the latest technology to offer unique products with the highest quality. On the island of Okinawa she discovered ‘green caviar’, a seaweed which extends ayouthful lifespan on its inhabitants. Another creation came from a client who dreamed about a complexion of mother-of-pearl, and the Doctor dared to marry marine pearls in a magnificently soft cream and an enchanting perfume.
The latest creation of Doctor Burgener is a unique and innovative concept: the Haute-Couture concept. With this, she analyses and personalizes skin care programs to give specialized treatments which replenish skin based on an individual’s specific skin type.
While close to her customers, she is also close to her faithful hotel partners for whom she develops exclusive products according to the desires and specific requests of hotels such as “The Care Signatures”. She has created creams with coconut for the Four Seasons SPA of Seychelles and marine pearls for their location in India. With so many tones and local scents the journey continues during the experience at the SPA. All products are natural, stemming from plants, with neither paraben nor colouring agents nor artificial perfumes.
The Doctor even wanted to push the exercise topackaging, by removing all products packaging and cardboard outer-packaging, onwhich classic brands have left a luxurious but somewhat heavy packaging withmultiple layers of a coloured, embossed paper, and printed with silver or hotgold and completely shrink-wrapped. Dr Burgeners creams are delicatelyprotected by a bag of microfibers, simple, smart, and especially reusable. It’s“an attractive bag to put diamonds in” the Doctor would roguishly say asher eyes glisten and she admits she had this brilliant idea by seeing a Ferrari packed in a cover of microfibers at a “Packaging” trade show in Monte Carlo. What an irony!
Exceptional hotels have the privilege to propose products to her including the Four-Seasons of Dubai, St-Petersburg, Moscow and that one in Manhattan that will open soon as well as the Hilton Atlantis and the Palazzo Versace in Dubai, the Hilton Habtoor in Beirut, the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat and the Grand Hôtel du Lac in Vevey, where we wrote this story. More openings are planned in the coming months. Visionary and curious abouteverything, its Day SPA, an aesthetic private clinic in Lausanne, proposes amultitude of treatments such as nutrition, osteopathy, plastic surgery,injections, cellular biology of the skin, because, she says, ” a woman must be able to find everything in a single place ” and she wanted to make it possible by using a holistic approach to well-being with a balance between natural products and the latest technology.
Rarely do we meet people as inspiring as Doctor Burgener. Bang Bang has met few this year and Pauline Burgener belongs to this group of women who give us faith in what we are doing, gives us the comforting feeling that the world of our children will be managed by the desire to spread good in a world of beauty and sharing. These are people who make you think anything is possible…
