Read 100 stories on the best beauty shops in Paris and 80 will say: CityPharma. Another other 10 might say the newer Grande Pharmie du Forum des Halles (indisputably a better choice) and the rest might say the beauty floors at Le Bon Marché, La Samaritaine, or Printemps.
They are all wrong. The best beauty shop in Paris is, without a doubt, Aroma-Zone.
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We have no real equivalent in the U.S: It’s like Home Depot, but for essential oils and carrier oils and pink Himalayan salt and everything else you need to make your own beauty, hair, and skincare products. It was founded in 1999 by a chemist and two of his daughters in Aix-en-Provence, who originally planned only to share DIY beauty recipes online. Over time, they started selling some of the materials and equipment needed to produce these concoctions — and now it’s everywhere, with shops from Montpellier to Brussels, its recent explosive growth obviously the product of a 2021 €400+ million investment from the private equity firm Eurozeo.
All we can do is hope that PE money doesn’t destroy the brand, because Aroma-Zone is the absolute best. Do you want to make a mango shampoo bar? A rose-scented “elixir jeunesse”? An ultra-hydrating face mask with aloe vera? One of the other top 50 recipes? Aroma-Zone has literally everything you need, from the lemon essential oil and aloe vera gel to the countertop scale, mixing bowls, and storage containers.
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The original location, on 25 rue de l’École de Médecine in the 6th (very close to the Odéon métro), is for me a no-go shop on Saturdays and after work because it’s so packed — the newest one, at the Forum des Halles, is more easily navigable (and also open on Sundays.) The first international shop opened in October, in Brussels, with additional expansion coming soon with shops in Spain and Switzerland.
What I love most about Aroma-Zone, beyond that incredible sense of DIY possibility I feel when I walk through its doors, is how reflective it is to French attitudes about beauty, and beauty products. I’ve never found a French skincare product as effective as American ones — everything is a little bit softer, a little bit gentler, a little bit less capable of — or expectant of — total transformation. There are deep cultural and commercial reasons for this: Our American culture is less tolerant of aging and so there are gargantuan financial incentives for companies to make products that address it. As I’ve experienced it, French consumers are less tolerant of — and suspicious of — claims of corporate cure-alls: I think there’s much more of a sense that you can’t cheat time. (And from that, I would argue, is a profound response: Because there is more acceptance around the idea that it’s impossible (or unwise) to cheat time (or simply that trying to look 18 at 60 is a fool’s errand), the ideas around what is “sexy” are more elastic. When you can be desirable longer, and when there are more ideas about what beauty can be — it is, after all, the home of the jolie-laide — the temperature around chasing beauty goes down, and instead of slathering our skin in pharmaceutical concoctions, there’s a space for DIY beauty. Along with the cultural reality that there’s more time for France for making, and more time in the U.S. for shopping, that is why Aroma-Zone is so huge in France and why we have no U.S. equivalent, at least for the time being.
I always know my argument’s overcomplicated itself by the number of parentheses in a given paragraph, and in the one above, I have reached my limit. Aroma-Zone is incredibly fun, and it offers a unique window into French beauty, which, if we believed their advertising, would extend only as far as the latest €zillion Chanel advertising campaign. But that isn’t France, or at least it’s not the only version of France. France is the fanciest but also the homiest. France is Michelin-starred restaurants and homemade beef stew. It’s the Ritz and countryside gites. It’s Chanel and DIY face scrubs. Aroma-Zone is the birthplace of hundreds of thousands of DIY face scrubs, and if that’s your sort of thing, like it is mine, it is heaven on Earth.
Here are some more excellent beauty shops in Paris, where you don’t have to make your own products.
