Los Angeles Times, CA
June 22 2008
BEAUTY
Facials pioneer Aida Thibiant, 80, is retiring
The aesthetician who made the deep-cleaning regimen popular now sees
medi-spas as the future.
By Emili Vesilind, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 22, 2008
AT ONCE homey and luxurious — boasting a staff of mostly European and
Russian aestheticians who will tell you straight-up when it’s time to
wax that cheek fuzz — Thibiant Beverly Hills has been an institution
for 33 years, having deep-cleaned the pores of almost every major
star, including Deborah Harry, Jodie Foster, Rod Stewart and Hayden
Panettiere.
But even well-moisturized eras must end. Now 80, Aida Thibiant is
retiring and selling her business to plastic surgeon Harry Glassman
and his business partner, Herminio Llevat. Though Thibiant will stay
on for a year as a consultant, the new owners will be converting the
business into a medical spa by September, delegating a suite of
treatment rooms for Botox, Restylane and lasers.
The change-over is a sign of the times, as more spas morph into
medical facilities. Facials can delay aging, but injections can erase
time — if only temporarily.
Thibiant is part of a generation of beauty pioneers (think Estée
Lauder and Georgette Klinger) who took the concept of skin care from
at-home, waxy cold creams to professionally administered regimens. But
with the rise of filler injections, that epoch is also ending.
"I wasn’t going toward the medi-spa, but that’s the future," said
Thibiant, who speaks with a lilting Armenian accent and is usually
clad in a neat tweed Chanel or Escada. "I have to follow the flow."
Glassman, who will be at the spa two days a week, said the facility
and its staff will otherwise remain unchanged.
Thibiant, who was raised in France and studied to be an aesthetician
in Paris in the 1950s, immigrated to L.A. with her late husband Michel
Thibiant and her two teenage sons in 1970. Back then, few Americans
knew what an aesthetician was.
But they soon learned. While she was working at the Sanctuary, a
trendy fitness center in Beverly Hills in the early ’70s, Thibiant’s
facials became a favorite of Ali McGraw and other celebrities,
garnering glowing reviews in Vogue and beauty journals that coined her
the "face saver to the stars." Her philosophy was to "always nurture,
build up and protect the skin," or to let the skin do what it’s able
to do naturally. Not exactly a medi-spa doctrine.
She launched her first spa in Beverly Hills in 1972. Her tough-love
facial became the industry standard: It emphasized deep cleaning over
easy massage, meaning extractions to the nth degree.
In the 1980s, she developed the still-popular skin-care line Principal
Secret with Victoria Principal. Her TV spots helped solidify the
current mode of celebrity-paired-with-expert format in beauty
infomercials.
Even though Thibiant is retiring, her products are not. Llevat will
work with Thibiant in the coming year to create a new skin care line,
the first to be distributed outside the spa. The beauty maven has lots
of practice, having launched her first products in 1978 via Thibiant
International Inc., a beauty manufacturing factory in Chatsworth that
Michel Thibiant spearheaded in the ’70s. It now manufactures Guinot
Paris skin care products in the U.S. and others for big-name beauty
conglomerates.
"I always dreamed of having my skin-care line everywhere," she
said. "I didn’t have time to do it before. You actually can do
everything, but you can’t do everything perfectly. And now it’s going
to happen after I retire." Thibiant smiles and shakes her head. "It’s
unbelievable."
http://www.latimes .com/features/printedition/image/la-ig-beauty22-20 08jun22,0,122047.story