Model Amber Valletta describes her first appearance in Vogue, when she was on the February 1993 cover, as “the moment that really blew up my career. It really put me on the map.”
In the years since, she’s landed 17 Vogue covers in total, gained the honorific supermodel, become a mother, acted in movies, and so much more. Along the way, she got involved in environmental advocacy: “It’s something that’s always been in my life, my mom was a community activist and helped to stop a nuclear power plant from being built on native land in Oklahoma, so I was around that kind of thinking.” She has also served as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.
As of today, all of this history has officially come together in a neat, chic, and absolutely eco-friendly package. “People seem to think that high-performance hair products and ultra-clean products or ones with advanced science can’t all come in the same bottle,” Valletta tells Vogue over Zoom. That’s when hairstylist Teddy Charles pops into the conversation: “But that’s what we created with Maison Beaux,” he says.
Maison Beaux is made up of six biodegradable haircare products (which fall into the categories of prep, treat, and style) that all come in eco-friendly bottles. Most impressive to me—I started my career at clean-beauty mecca Goop, after all—is Le Ultimate Mask, a soufflé of collagen, exosomes, peptides, and amino acids that comes in packaging that will break down in a home compost in just 12 weeks. It has all the chops of a hair-reviving treatment you’d get at a fancy French spa, but it can come home with you.
“The thing I learned during my career is that beautiful hair is always healthy,” Charles says. But when it came to creating formulas that were clean yet effective, it was easier said than done at times. The duo chose to ban and avoid 2,850 different ingredients from the formulas (in comparison, the United States bans 11 while the European Union bans around 1,000), which made creating each product into a Goldilock’s-level odyssey—some were too thin, other’s didn’t lather enough, and so on. Until, finally, things were just right.
“We didn’t cut corners, but instead kept pushing through,” Valletta says. “These products are high-performance, salon-grade products with advanced clean science. There’s nothing on the market like this.” And they smell subtle-but-lovely, too: orange blossom, sweet almond, and musk.
