Biologique Recherche is cleaning up.

The 40-plus-year-old French brand is at the forefront of key trends in skin care: personalization, biotechnology, innovation and a novel approach to retail. Part of bringing the brand into its next chapter is simply harkening back to all of the things that made its market debut disruptive years ago, according to chief executive officer Jean-Guillaume Trottier.

“What was groundbreaking back in the day is the concept of personalization, which didn’t exist in skin care,” Trottier said. “It didn’t exist then, and we hear it now, but it’s often a marketing trick. We believe every skin type is different, evolving differently from one season to another. From birth, to menopause, the brand is founded in this deep interest we have in skin and what’s happening with it.”

Enter the brand’s franchise, VIP O2, through which its masks and cleansing milk, always performed. Trottier has stretched that range’s equity into hair care, introducing shampoo and conditioner.

“We have spent the past 40 years collecting [skin] data,” Trottier said. “It’s very helpful for the R&D team to understand the evolution of skin based on root causes of aging.”

The brand’s roots are also in the clinical space, as during Biologique Recherche’s early days, the only place where doctors licensed to use them were in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Those practitioners “all came to New York,” Trottier said. “They are the ones who developed the brand in the U.S. Even today, when we hire an aesthetician, they have three months of training before even touching a customer.”

That’s the amount of time it takes for an aesthetician to understand the breadth of products — and technologies driving them.

“We are not marketing-led, we are R&D-led,” he said. “When we were crystalizing the brand for my first year, we looked at the fields of research we explored. I call it avant-garde science, or creative science. We’ve always been inspired by regenerative medicine, and not following ingredient trends. Lotion P50 was one of the first chemical peelings at home, and still is a top seller. Same with Placenta, which was our first serum.”

The brand updates its heroes regularly, including its Placenta serum. What initially used human placenta for its hero ingredient then started using pig Placenta, and now entails a bioengineered equivalent to the original. As it relates to the updated VIP O2 range, which also includes a facial moisturizer, “We didn’t reformulate because of the ingredients, but it’s because we went back to the inception of the product. The concept behind oxygenation, which we created an exclusive patent around, also came from medical research to create,” Trottier said. “That’s how we are differentiating from the competition. We don’t work on trends, we don’t work on star ingredients. It’s about the resilience of the brand.”

Biologique Recherche also works with an oncology center that specializes in dermatology, as well as with a biotech company. Though that makes launch lead times unpredictable, Trottier said to expect more innovations to come next year. “It’s a new serum I cannot reveal yet,” he said, “but it’s going to be quite interesting in the world of prevention.”

In tandem with that, Trottier has also put in a fresh team to reinvigorate the brand’s identity: He tapped Ezra Petronio and Lana Petrusevych to rejigger the brand’s logo, and hired Wandjina Glasheen-Brown as its creative director. “Her role is going to be to express who we are for the customer and not only the product, but the story behind it,” he said. “And, we’re going into retail.”

That includes a new expression of the brand at Le Bon Marché in Paris and the opening of a flagship in New York in April, which will take over the pop-up space the brand opened earlier this year. “We also signed with Bloomingdale’s to open the top five doors as well as online,” Trottier said. “We perform extremely well with 10 feet of shelves. We take big projects, and what we are seeing is we have the customer for retail. What was the brand’s core customer for 40 years is the skin intellectual driven by product efficacy, and now, we are trying to capture and engage a new one. They are 50 percent driven by product efficacy, but 50 percent by brand story.”

The merchandising will be by skin concern as opposed to product category, “and we are able to propose eight skin concerns to the customer. Competition proposes around four, and what we’ve tested is that the engagement around that is very powerful,” he said.

Don’t expect hundreds of doors to open in the immediate future. “We are going to expand in retail, but not fast and furious,” Trottier said. “We will remain very selective with our distribution, and with high productivity by door. What is important is by making bold creative choices, which could even just be from a science perspective, we’re going to build the cult for the new generation.”