NUXE

NUXE is a French skincare and beauty company based in Paris, built around plant-oil formulation and the idea of pairing the discipline of French pharmacy with a sensorial, luxurious finish. Its name is a contraction of the French words for nature and luxe (luxury), and that pairing has shaped the brand from the start. NUXE is most widely known for Huile Prodigieuse, a multi-purpose dry oil for face, body and hair that became its signature product and a fixture of the "French pharmacy" beauty category.

The company was built by founder Aliza Jabès, who took over a small, pre-existing Parisian formulation laboratory and developed it into a full beauty house. Accounts differ on exactly when NUXE began. The brand's own history page dates the company to 1991, the year Huile Prodigieuse launched [1], while a trade-press feature and a founder interview place its creation in 1989, the year Jabès is said to have established NUXE and chosen its nature-and-luxury name [9]. The two dates are best read as marking different points in a short sequence — the brand's creation and the launch of its defining product — rather than a genuine disagreement about the facts.

NUXE was founded by Aliza Jabès, who, according to the company, was introduced to plants by her pharmacist father. At the start of the 1990s she acquired a small Parisian natural-cosmetology laboratory and gathered around it a team of researchers specializing in botany, formulation and galenics — the pharmaceutical science of preparing and compounding medicines. A founder interview from the mid-2010s recounts how she "discovered NUXE, a small formulation laboratory in Paris, and decided to make it the springboard for building a beauty brand" that, in her words, would bring together nature and luxury [7].

That ambition — clinical credibility delivered as an everyday luxury — has remained the company's central pitch. The brand describes its founding aim as reconciling "the irreconcilable": the rigour and quality associated with French pharmacy on one side, and the pleasure of appealing textures and fragrances on the other.

NUXE's history is told largely through its products. Huile Prodigieuse, the multi-purpose dry oil that anchors the range, came first [1]. It was followed in 1994 by the Rêve de Miel honey lip balm and in 1999 by the Crème Fraîche de Beauté moisturizer, two launches that broadened the brand beyond its original oil.

In 2002 the company moved into spa services with the opening of NUXE Spa Montorgueil in central Paris, which the founder has described as her first spa. It then expanded into anti-ageing with the Nuxuriance range in 2005 and the Merveillance line, formulated with mimosa seeds, in 2006, before entering fragrance in 2012 with the Prodigieux eau de parfum and adding a sun-care collection, NUXE Sun, in 2013.

More recent launches reflect a turn toward higher-technology formulation. In 2021 the company introduced Super Serum, described as a universal age-defying concentrate made using microfluidic technology, and in 2023 it released Hair Prodigieux, a hair-care line built around fermented pink camellia oil.

NUXE presents itself as a pioneer of "natural cosmetology," combining a high proportion of natural-origin ingredients with the safety and testing standards associated with pharmacy-grade skincare. The company says it favours vegetable oils over mineral oils, on the argument that plant oils deliver genuine skincare benefits, and that its formulas avoid synthetic dyes, sulphates in shampoos and silicones in hair products.

The brand is generally placed in the prestige tier and sits within the broader "French pharmacy" tradition — an association reinforced by editorial coverage that has referred to NUXE as a "famous French pharmacie brand." Its stated values centre on four ideas: nature, luxury, French pharmacy expertise and sensoriality.

Huile Prodigieuse remains NUXE's defining product. The company describes it as a blend of seven botanical oils — among them tsubaki, argan, macadamia, borage, camellia, hazelnut and sweet almond — formulated as a fast-absorbing dry oil for face, body and hair. NUXE reports that the formula is 98% of natural origin under the ISO 16128 standard, and cites a usage test on 29 volunteers over 28 days in which skin was reported softer for all participants and nourished for 97%.

Other products carry the range across categories: the Rêve de Miel honey lip balm, the Crème Fraîche de Beauté moisturizer, the Prodigieux eau de parfum, and the Super Serum concentrate. Across the line the company leans on plant-derived actives such as mimosa-seed extracts and camellia oil.

NUXE develops its products in its own formulation laboratory, staffed by specialists in botany, skin biology, galenics and perfumery. The company says the team has registered more than 40 patents with INPI, France's national intellectual-property institute, which it states has recognized the brand for innovation on two occasions [2]. According to the company, all skincare products are reviewed in a safety assessment by an independent toxicologist and tested under dermatological control. On formulation, NUXE states that all of its products are vegetarian and that 90% are also vegan, with the exceptions limited to bee-derived ingredients such as honey, beeswax and propolis [2].

The company organizes its corporate-responsibility commitments around sustainable sourcing and biodiversity, responsible product development from formula to packaging, and employee well-being. It says it evaluates suppliers through the EcoVadis system and requires them to sign an ethical charter covering the Nagoya Protocol and CITES Convention, and it lists membership of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil among its sourcing measures.

Among its stated targets, NUXE aimed for full ingredient traceability by 2025 using DNA analysis, and a further 20% reduction in plastic by the same year, having already cut plastic in its Merveillance Lift range by 35% in 2022 [3]. Manufacturing is described as fully French, carried out primarily in Lécousse, in Brittany. As of the sources reviewed, the company makes vegan and natural-origin claims of its own but holds no formal third-party certification such as Ecocert, COSMOS or B Corp.

NUXE's recognition is tied closely to Huile Prodigieuse, which is frequently cited as a cult favourite of the French-pharmacy genre. Marie Claire UK described it as "adored by both French it-girls and beauty editors worldwide" [6], and other beauty publications have written about its cult following. The company supports that reputation with a frequently repeated sales statistic — that one bottle of Huile Prodigieuse is sold every seven seconds somewhere in the world [10]. The figure has appeared with different cadences across sources and years, variously six, seven, ten or eleven seconds; seven seconds is the brand's current stated number. Beyond product press, NUXE cites the INPI innovation recognition noted above as formal acknowledgement of its laboratory work.

NUXE is an active, globally distributed brand. It has continued to launch products in recent years, including Hair Prodigieux in 2023, and maintains current activity on its official social channels, posting as @nuxe on Instagram and TikTok [10]. Its official website operates at nuxe.com, and its formulation and production remain based in France.

The company is widely described as an independent, family-controlled French business, though no explicit statement of its current ownership was available in the sources reviewed for this article.