Meet the ‘superfacialist’ worth traveling to Paris for

Mali-born, Paris-based facialist Sophie Carbonari is making waves. Her international client base includes model and former first lady Carla Bruni, French model Caroline de Maigret, the vampires’ diaries actress Nina Dobrev and musician Lou Doillon. One of Naomi Campbell’s favorite facialists, she has worked with the supermodel on set. Carbonari visits London once a month to see clients, has hosted a pop-up residency at The Venice Venice Hotel, and travels to the Cannes Film Festival to care for his A-list clientele. This month, he launches the first product in a debut skincare line.

Carbonari’s technique is what draws fans to his light, brilliant Paris studio, where the windows overlook the Jardin du Palais Royal, a few steps from the Louvre. The “Sophie Carbonari protocol”, as she calls it, brings Japanese together covid and “cosmofacial” rituals with Ayurvedic techniques and lymphatic drainage.

“First, I put pressure points on the fascia and the skin pops out,” she says. “You will hear it. I feel muscular tension and lymphatic retention. The second is the superficial level and I do the same with the index finger; I feel where there is stuck blood, or crystallized lymph nodes. next me [connect with] each point of the face and unlock everything for about 30 minutes, with pressure and rolling.”

I connect with, and unlock, every point on the face.

Clients are evangelical about the results. But apparently there is more. “I could tell you about Sophie’s art of working my skin and how she carefully sculpts the contours of my face and what she looks like afterwards,” she says of Maigret. “But what also stood out to me when I met her many years ago is that Sophie is kind, funny and generous. Her solar aura about her is contagious, and I know she reflects on my face when I come out of a treatment. That makes all the difference.”

Carbonari honed his skills in the Chi Yu Wellness Center in Marylebone, where she started working in 2013. “It was a new philosophy for me,” she says of the Japanese approach to holistic health and its ethos of supporting the body’s ability to heal itself. “And put meaning behind what he was doing: it’s a wellness action, not just for the skin.” She left to join a medi-spa in midtown Manhattan in 2016, but returned to France within a year.

Millie Kendall of the British Beauty Council refers to Carbonari as a “super facialist.” “It’s a very elitist category where someone has developed a unique technique, method, or protocol,” says Kendall. “Finding your niche is important when launching into this highly competitive field. Beauty treatments are a growing category – we are seeing more beauty businesses open than ever before, with a massive increase in micro-businesses with fewer than four employees.”

Sophie Carbonari Skincare launches with a single serum made in Korea. “My clients were always a little lost. They have 10 serums and they don’t know what to do, so they apply them all at once!” Her S Serum (£260 for 30ml) is a “multi-perfecting cocktail” of potent ingredients including hyaluronic acid, Centella Asiatica extract, and argan and black cumin oils to improve skin firmness, even skin tone skin and reduce the appearance of age spots and scars “I focused on precious, healing oils that are good for blood circulation and soothe irritation and regulate sebum.”

The Botanic Gardens at London’s Barbican and Lake Como are her horticultural inspiration spots, and she also mixes her own cleanser, scrub, and masks. But, he says, “I don’t want to create 20 products and I don’t have the audacity to say that it takes a whole range to be perfect.” Still, he concludes: “You never know what the journey may bring.”

sophiecarbonari.com