Sophie Carbonari: The Dedication In The Palm Of Her Hands
Breaking Free From The Parisian Woman Narration Through Beauty
Writing for Naïfs Magazine is an enriching experience as I get to ask the people I interview the questions I don’t see other media outlets ask them. That was the case for facialist Sophie Carbonari. I discovered her three years ago, when Vogue France published a video of her for their Une fille, un style Youtube series. I must admit I wasn’t that excited, but it isn’t Sophie’s fault. Une fille, un style is about letting Vogue France into the homes of creative women (and men) in Paris, but not only. I used to watch this series as it was, for me, the only interesting thing about Vogue France. Even though it presented a pretty homogeneous crowd of women, mainly well,off, European and white, it was a fresher way to present the Parisian woman. If some matched the cliché, others didn’t. And that’s what made it enjoyable to watch. This said, probably because of the format and script, I often felt some people featured deserved a more in-depth interview. So when Amanda Kabuiku, Naïfs Magazine editor-in-chief, proposed me to write about Sophie Carbonari, I was first skeptical because that Vogue France video and the many interviews I read of her mainly focused on her success. Not how she became one of the best facialists in the fashion industry. And there was even less about who she is. Rarely there are stories about people like Sophie Carbonari in the Parisian beauty and fashion industry. So, I wanted to convey this.
Very often, the media describes entrepreneurship as the destiny of a few chosen ones whose dream success is sold to us to become, in turn, out of the ordinary. Like Sophie Carbonari, I am not Parisian. I packed my bags and left when I was against the wall. Like her, I ended up sleeping in the company where I worked because I had no housing. In short, it is rare in industries such as fashion and beauty, where backgrounds and education are homogeneous and success dictated by social class, to find someone whose experience is close to ours. Through Sophie Carbonari, entrepreneurship takes on an earthly dimension rooted in a reality that is easy to identify with. Today, one of the most coveted beauticians in the fashion industry, Sophie Carbonari, warmly told me about her multifaceted career and how she became, without a surname, heritage, and fortune, a sure value of the world of beauty.
“In the early 2010s, the people who did my job were socially relegated to cashier status,” Sophie Carbonari tells me. This sentence piqued my interest because the cliché, as terrible as it is, reflects the schizophrenic relationship that French society has with the world and professions of beauty care. While cosmetics giants such as Clarins, Laura Mercier, and La Roche-Posay are positioned on the market as “secret” products of la Parisienne, this fantasized and non-existent woman exported all over the world as the French woman’s ideal of beauty that Americans envy us for; the beautician, instead, is a hidden figure. I dare to hypothesize that the social contempt aestheticians suffer from is due to the fact that, as journalist Alice Pfeiffer writes in her book Je ne suis pas parisienne, éloge de toutes les françaises (I am not Parisian, an ode to all French women): “Being beautiful is a promise of good taste, bourgeois social class, belonging, something with which one is born with, and not something that you can buy.” The beauty therapist is, therefore, confined to hair removal, manicures, and pedicures. Although she carries out a profession directly affecting mental well-being, she becomes a figure that goes against the idea of an innate beauty that would require no effort. But the prejudice against that profession didn’t discourage Sophie Carbonari, as she said: “The most important thing is to love what you do. When you love what you do, you can go wherever you want. When, on the contrary, you don’t like your job, you put yourself in a box for the rest of your life.”
But where does this passion for beauty come from? At first glance, in this world where “in the collective consciousness, being an aesthetician means being blonde with a bun, and wearing a blouse,” she tells me,nothing destined her to become a beauty therapist. Very aware of the lack of representation in this industry, she adds, “this cliché of the beautician makes people who are not Caucasian think that this type of profession is not for them because they do not see themselves there.” Born in Bamako, Mali, in 1989, Sophie Carbonari cultivated a passion for beauty from her earliest age by observing her parents. Adopted by a French couple, she grew up between Nîmes and Arles, with her biological brother and her South Korean sister. When she talks about her family, I immediately think of mine, where the only people with the same skin tone are my mother and me. So, like her, I grew up in a family where beauty rituals are diverse, and in which the time spent in the bathroom is sacred. “I grew up in a family where hygiene includes self-care. It’s not just about washing yourself or putting on cream, but it is about doing all this with care,” she continues, “my mother struggled a lot with our hair, poor her. It wasn’t easy in the 90s, but she managed to get through it.” I grew up with a mother who didn’t know how to braid or care for my hair in the 90s. And yes, Afro hair care is not an innate quality of Black women. So it was my father, concerned about us, who looked for hairstyling books and hairdressers for my mother and me. And although living in Bordeaux, a city and not a village unlike Sophie, in the 90s, finding products and a good hairdresser who knew both braiding and Afro hair care (because one does not mean the other) was a real uphill battle.
These parallels between her personal history and mine show in a rather pictorial way that representation causes this effect: identification. From a professional point of view, I owe, in part, my career as a fashion journalist to my parents and their love for style, clothing, and fashion, which they use as tools for their well-being and self-confidence. This is why, once again, I identify with her words: “The foundation of my identity and my work comes from the fact that I was raised in a multicultural and open-minded family.” Unfortunately, this openness was strictly confined within the family circle. Sophie Carbonari believes that her dyslexia is “one of the main reasons why [she] was oriented towards manual work and did not continue [her] studies.” Her educational path echoes the idea that the French school system tackles learning disorders without methodology and consequently directs those who suffer from them towards a single professional path. But Sophie surprises me because she does not complain. On the contrary, she considers a chance the possibility of having been able to move towards vocational training from the age of sixteen. It is by doing her professional qualification in Marseille that she falls in love with her profession. In 2007, thanks to the creation of the self-entrepreneurship status by Nicolas Sarkozy, at just nineteen, she became an aesthetician for a year and a half before taking over a beauty institute in Aix-en-Provence for a symbolic euro. She closes after a year and admits: “It was a disaster because I was not ready at all for everything like accounting, management, etc.” What strikes me most about this experience is her ability to bounce back in the face of adversity. Far from being discouraged, she refused to listen to anyone who told her that this experience was a failure because, in her eyes, it was one of her most beautiful experiences.
She then left for London without knowing a word of English, but her determination made her learn the language in six months. Of this decision and failure, which she sees as an opportunity, she recalls, “I didn’t even want to hear anyone trying to explain me the whys or the hows. I knew that I made the right decision and that I had to speak English to move forward. That was my motivation.” Once again, I found myself in her words. An experience in Munich, where I arrived without a penny but with an iron discipline and a desire to get where I wanted, allowed me to find a job after six months of internship and hard research. In the articles I have written so far for Naïfs, there is always a bit of me, but this time, it is really difficult for me to remain only the narrator as Sophie’s battles reflect mine. I subscribe to many podcasts where entrepreneurs tell their stories, and although they are informative, never when I listen to them, I tell myself that their story is as close to hand as Sophie’s. Once again, the power of representation is felt with immense force. It is exactly for this reason that I refuse to define her career as unusual because it is representative of young people who didn’t go to grandes écoles (the French equivalent of Ivy leagues universities or Cambridge and Oxford) or came from affluent social backgrounds but whose past is all the more fascinating to explore because they learn on the job and develop a unique work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit.
Representation is one thing, but it isn’t enough. It is the hazards of Sophie’s personal and professional history that are enlightening. “The work of an entrepreneur requires killing your ego,” she tells me. And she insists, “You have to get rid of it.” It was her hours carrying her equipment, cleaning it, and taking care of her clients that taught her humility. She owes her very pragmatic vision of entrepreneurship to her father — a craftsman and a Compagnon du Devoir (guild of craftsmen) — but especially to the fact that in each decision she took, her parents deliberately chose not to help her. “From twenty to twenty-nine, it was nine years of learning where I accepted to lose everything, learn from my mistakes, and be resilient. I accepted to lose when it was inevitable, but I also knew that it should not last too long because I had to eat, I had to get up,” she says. Each experience, negative or positive, becomes a source of enrichment for Sophie. While in London, she was hired at a Japanese beauty institute, where she learned all the techniques of working meridians according to Chinese medicine. After almost seven years, she flew to New York, where she discovered the world of cosmetic surgery in a clinic where she was a beautician. Because her work visa was rejected, she had to return to France, where she stayed for a little less than a year in a beauty institute in Aix-en-Provence. In 2017, she returned to London only to find that she could not work.
After leaving this last job, Sophie received French clients in her London apartment, where she offered them hair removal. At the same time, like the Afro hairdressers and barbers who rent a seat in salons that populate London, she rented a treatment room in a small institute located in the affluent district of Marylebone. This is where her Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial spirit sharpened. Hair removal at home allowed her regular income, while at Marylebone, she practised facials; in other words, she established her reputation as a facialist. Sophie Carbonari explains: “In 2018, I was very much Americanized. I had well integrated the notion of marketing on Instagram and how to build my profile as a facialist on the platform without paying much money. However, I still lacked a little self-confidence, so I took a coach, but they were incompetent. When we doubt, we always rely on people who have fake charisma.” She mentioned that one of her greatest challenges was her lack of instinct initially, which is why she liked the mentor figure. Sophie gradually realized she knew what she wanted, and when she finally found her instinct, she listened. That’s how she decided to send invitations to Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, however, they remained unanswered, but that didn’t stop her. Eventually, answers came from Caroline de Maigret, singer Inna Modja, and finally from Sophia Amoruso.
Enjoying weekly beauty treatments, Caroline de Maigret made an appointment with Sophie at Marylebone and warned that if she didn’t like the treatment, she would not post anything on her social media. The attitude of the author of How To Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Style and Bad Habits may seem unexpected as she embodies so much the ultimate Parisian, yet it is she who catapulted Sophie Carbonari to the forefront of the fashion scene by making two posts and stories on Instagram. This resulted in an ultra-booked agenda with fashion professionals, including former Victoria’s Secret angel Maria Borges, which earned her a mention in Vogue UK. Sophie Carbonari’s success didn’t happen overnight. Whether it is Caroline de Maigret or Maria Borges, both love her treatments because they result from a protocol she has developed over the years. “Even if I had to work 24 hours a day at my workplace, I thought I might as well develop my own method and approach to massage faces,” she tells me of her year in Aix-en-Provence, where she slept in the beauty institute she worked for. It is there that she combined the techniques learned in a Japanese institute and the traditional French know-how. The result? “A treatment that has an immediate effect on the long-term and, above all, it makes you feel high. It is what makes me different from the others,” she says, bursting with laughter. Between meditation and beauty care, Sophie’s protocol does not claim to be spiritual.
After understanding the impact the Parisian influencer had on her clientele, she decided to go to Paris during the 2019 haute couture season. She sent emails to several major hotels in the capital and got the green light from the hotel Grand Amour, who rented her a suite after negotiating to welcome her customers. That was an investment that, at the time, she wasn’t sure would bear its fruits, but it was without counting once again on Caroline de Maigret, who not only came back but made another post that took the young entrepreneur’s Instagram profile to another level. This operation was a success and Sophie came back for the ready-to-wear season and then every two months. When she decided to go to Paris, Covid hit so, she returned in panic to France in March 2020. Sophie learned to adapt and made videos on Instagram that were a great success and led her to participate in the iconic Youtube video series Une fille, un style of Vogue France. Sophie tells me honestly, “the beauty world is very much like the pharmaceutical market. They don’t take into account people’s ethnicity. The ideal is the caucasian type because dermatological tests are done on white people. Asian people, Black people, or people from Oceania (editor’s note: native people from New Caledonia, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, and Polynesia) are either classified as a dark crowd or people with no skin problem.” Our conversation ends with the beauty’s industry lack of consideration for non-white people. Whether through her career or convictions, Sophie Carbonari is proof that beauty therapists have an important added value in our societies.
Original Text Emmanuelle Maréchal
Translated from French by Henna Kornblum
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Very informative, thank you!