Beauty That Gives You More Than Just A Pretty Face

Luxury beauty brand Chantecaille has a mission: to turn the everyday beauty consumer into an environmental crusader – and it makes things as easy for the consumer as putting on lipstick.

Thirteen years ago, Sylvie Chantecaille, founder of New York-based luxury beauty brand Chantecaille, found herself puzzled by the dwindling number of monarch butterflies in her rose garden. It was September – the month when the garden should have been bustling with the winged creatures – but she welcomed only a handful of them.

Turns out, the milkweed flowers that the butterflies normally feed on after they emerge from their cocoons were blooming earlier because of global warming. This led to many of the butterflies starving to death. Their migration stops were vanishing too, with the destruction of pine trees in Mexico – the destination of their migratory route from Canada. The monarch butterflies were becoming an endangered species.

It inspired the now 74-year-old beauty mogul to launch a series of limited-edition butterfly-embossed makeup through her brand in 2006. For this, the company partnered with the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary Foundation, which conserves land in Mexico for the butterflies to migrate to.

That was her brand’s first foray into wildlife philanthropy since its establishment in 1997.

“Everyone was asking about the makeup: ‘What’s this? It’s so pretty.’ I told them, ‘yes, it’s pretty, but we’re more concerned about the butterflies’. That’s how we were able to start talking and get people listening,” she says.