My Stories — Part I
Share
How NEOTEN Was Born
Nature first
When I was a child, nature wasn’t a backdrop — it was the space I lived in.
It was everywhere.
The hills behind the house.
Down below, a small stream and its banks.
The castle garden.
The meadow and the fields stretching far beyond the edge of town.
That’s where we grew up.
We knew what could be eaten and what couldn’t.
Our bodies were already learning — long before we were aware of it.
We were outside every day, inside nature’s open laboratory.
We played. We observed. We experimented.
Looking back now, I see it clearly:
we were at once children, curious explorers, and part of the experiment itself.
As if we had lived in another dimension — where layers of reality naturally overlap.
Another world
Then came the city.
The years of studying.
Less green. More concrete.
A world governed by different rules.
Here, letters became important. Concepts. Systems.
Nature slowly drifted away — no longer something we touched every day.
It became a thought. A memory. An abstraction.
As if something essential had slipped into the background —
without me yet having the words to name its absence.
Hands, beauty, matter
At twenty, I became a hairdresser.
I began working with my hands. With the body. With material.
Later, I built my own business. I taught, travelled, shared knowledge.
And all the while, I moved deeper into the world of beauty —
among formulas, colours, textures, reactions.
There was a lot of chemistry.
A lot of anatomy.
And somewhere along the way, the first reconnection happened.
Nature returned — no longer as fields and trees,
but as ingredients, molecules, reactions.
Every day, while styling and colouring hair, the same question came back:
What if there were products that adapted to us?
Not the other way around.
Discomfort
Over time, something shifted.
Large companies changed formulas faster and faster.
Marketing decided — not quality.
Mass. Quantity. Repetition.
And less and less attention.
It saddened me.
And my body began to respond as well.
After twenty years, I knew what harsh chemicals, synthetic fragrances, and silicones do —
not in theory, but through lived experience.
The body learns.
And the body doesn’t lie.
If you listen, it answers — without needing to be questioned.
Returning — differently
At thirty, I moved to France.
I began studying again: medicinal plants, aromatherapy, phytotherapy, nutrition.
At first, it was for myself.
It came from a need for inner balance.
But soon, another world opened up —
the world of material-aware creators.
People working at the threshold between nature and science.
Starting from plants —
yet grounded in biochemistry, botany, anatomy.
They don’t only create products.
They shape states. Balance. Well-being.
This is where things began to make sense.
The name
Before NEOTEN existed, months passed in quiet.
Drawings. Sketches. Abandoned ideas.
Hundreds of logos.
Countless names that didn’t stay with me.
I played with words — across languages.
Searching for something that wouldn’t explain, but would carry meaning.
Then two words met.
Neo — new, young, a beginning.
Tenere — to hold, to preserve, to hold gently.
NEOTEN was born.
Not as a definition.
But as a possibility.
To preserve freshness.
To hold on to what is alive.
Or whatever it comes to mean for you — I leave that open.
From now on, it becomes part of your ritual.
Part I ends here.
(The story — the journey — continues.)
Part I ends here. (The story — the journey — continues.)