Skin Health Magazine Issue #7 / Spring 2018 | Page 26

My Skin Journey
JULIEN AZENCOTT
I started my career at L’Oréal and this is where
I really fell in love with the skin care industry.
I then went to work in a lab, developing prod-
ucts for private label brands and designing skin
care ranges for pharmacies, so I could really
understand how the formulation process really
operated. After a few years, I created my own
brand CODAGE with my sister Amandine.
We grew up in a very medical environment –
our dad is a heart surgeon and our mother is
a dentist – so we understand the importance
of nutrition and education when it comes to
the body. Growing up in that environment led
us down a very obvious path to beauty and
skin care.
When we first started, we had no finished
products. Instead, we set up our contemporary
apothecary concept store in Paris where we
stored fresh ingredients and could create a
formula just for you, a service which we called
My CODAGE. We opened our lab and got
together with a pharmacist and started to
create products for people and their skin’s
needs. Everything changed when we were
asked to create some formulas for the Cannes
Film Festival by Rolls-Royce. Clients started
asking for products for dryness and rosacea,
so we decided to launch a ready-to-wear line
of products, alongside our more haute couture
formulas, in 2012.
The skin is like a machine and at times a
machine doesn’t work well. We have all the
resources in ourselves to maintain hydration,
to detox, to create elasticity, but sometimes life,
stress, whatever it is, can change things so you
need to bring the nutrients back into your body
to make this machine work better. To do this,
we believe in a complete formula. It’s not only
one star ingredient that is going to deliver
results, it’s a mixology of components.
At CODAGE, we don’t believe in miracle solu-
tions at all. We believe in helping people to
understand their skin first before understanding
what products you need to use. This is why we
call ourselves CODAGE – it means code, it
means formula, and we let you get inside the
formula of our products so you can truly un-
derstand everything that is inside, then you can
really focus on your skin and take the best care
of it. The market is so saturated now, so we
wanted to bring out a range of advanced cos-
meceuticals with amazing formulas that were
also enjoyable to use. It’s a beautiful thing to
take care of your skin, your products shouldn’t
look like medicine and they shouldn’t be filled
with silicones and fragrance – it isn’t make-up,
it’s skin care, so it has to be clean, pure, active
and about delivering results.
We consider ourselves true designers of beauty
and we work in the same way a fashion design-
er would work. We love to create formulas
ISSUE #07 | 2018 | SkinHealthMagazine.com 26
T
he French are world-renowned for
their expertise in skin care. French
pharmacies have long been the place
where locals and visitors can mine for advice
and discuss their products with a trusted
expert, and it’s this personal touch that has
made Parisian brand CODAGE such a popular
range throughout Europe. We spoke to
co-founder Julien Azencott about ready-to-
wear skin care, ditching the term ‘miracle
product’ and why education is much more
important that marketing hype.