How YSL Beauty is supporting a Moroccan women’s co-operative

Sitting at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, 50km outside of Marrakech, Ourika Community Gardens is an organic, regenerative laboratory for YSL Beauty. Each of the brand’s products – whether skincare, fragrance or make-up – feature at least one of the more than 200 botanicals cultivated there. The gardens feel a little like paradise. It’s peaceful and verdant, elegantly designed but humming with nature: roosters crow in the distance, a German Shepherd wanders unleashed through its rows of plants, and every ten steps you are confronted with a new scent, from the lush, dreamy tones of jasmine and iris to the sharper edges of lavender and bergamot.

The project first began in 2014, when YSL Beauty began looking for saffron to use in its Or Rouge skincare range. The environmental conditions in the Atlas Mountains are perfect for growing saffron, but it’s a highly seasonal crop which the team soon realised provided women in the region with only two weeks of work per year. With a local NGO as an intermediary, they began meeting with these women and discussing ideas for more reliable sources of income. The conversations led to the cultivation of more botanicals in the valley in 2015, and finally the construction of Ourika Community Gardens in 2019, encapsulating YSL Beauty’s work in the region.

“The woman told us that what they’d like to do, and what they know how to do, is to grow and harvest flowers. So we started working with different communities to empower those women, and we decided to plant different botanicals in order to make sure that they can work all year round,” Caroline Nègre, the brand’s international sustainability and scientific director, tells Dazed. The women at Ourika Community Gardens are members of a co-operative, which in practical terms means that they set their own schedules, decide how to invest their profits and what kind of training they want to take, and effectively work for themselves – as well as collaborating with YSL Beauty, they use the gardens to make olive oil, tea and other products which they sell to tourists. “They were the first women’s cooperative of the region, and they’ve inspired other women, so now there’s more than ten,” says Nègre. This has had a life-changing impact on those involved, providing financial autonomy and security in a region marked by high unemployment and where women typically don’t work at all.  

In the years since it opened, Ourika Community Gardens has had a transformative impact on YSL Beauty’s range of products. When it comes to skincare, the ingredients are chosen because they possess a specific benefit: jasmine, for example, is hydrating and improves elasticity, while saffron reduces redness and inflammation. An extract taken from the Ourika garden’s orange blossom trees, which also beautifies the skin, has been infused in YSL Beauty’s first-ever alcohol-free fragrance, Libre L’Eau Nue, which was launched earlier this year with a campaign starring Dua Lipa. Maintaining the bold character of Libre without alcohol - which typically plays an important role in perfume-making - was a complex process requiring over sixty trials. Alongside the orange blossom extract, YSL’s perfumers used state-of-the-art technology known as the “headspace” to capture an accord from the flower, distilling its essence in its purest form. The end result is a product which leaves the skin glowing and refreshed, as well as being just as vivid as any fragrance made with alcohol. 

It’s no coincidence that the Ourika Gardens project is based in Morocco, which for decades was a profound source of inspiration for Yves Saint Laurent. After first visiting the country in 1966, many of his most famous collections drew from the vivid colours and intricate patterns of its traditional ceramics, textiles and architecture. As he once said himself, “Once I grew sensitive to light and colours, I especially noticed the light on colours[...] on every street corner in Marrakech, you encounter astonishingly vivid groups of men and women, which stand out in a blend of pink, blue, green, and purple caftans.” During a period in fashion when most designers favoured the monochromatic and tastefully muted, Yves Saint Laurent’s embrace of colour helped to redefine elegance. “He used to come here twice a year or more and he was always very close to the Moroccan people,” author and Yves Saint Lauren historian Laurence Benaim, tells Dazed. “His personal link with Morocco was all about the colors and the smells. When you smell the Libre perfume, you can feel the sun on your skin.” 

 There is a through-line between YSL Beauty sustainability efforts today, which include large-scale rewilding projects and biodiversity preservation, and Yves Saint Laurent’s love of nature, Benaim suggests.“It wouldn’t have made sense to talk about ‘sustainability’ during his time, but nature was a major source of inspiration for him, from the  Jardin Marjorelle and the Villa Oasis to the gardens depicted by painters like Matisse,” she says. “He never considered nature as something to dominate but instead celebrated the wildness of it. It’s all about that balance between wildness and civilization.”

 Alongside YSL Beauty’s ongoing ‘Abuse is Not Love’ campaign, which partners with non-profits to fight against intimate partner violence, Ourika Gardens also continues what the brand understands as a core part of its legacy: empowering women. According to Benaim, this was always at the heart of Yves Saint Laurent’s creative vision. Until he launched Le Smoking (a tuxedo) in 1966, for example, it was frowned upon for women to wear trousers and other masculine garments.  “He was very humble,” she says. “He didn’t say, ‘I freed the woman’, and I think that’s because he considered the woman as very free. Instead, he gave them the power of assuming their freedom, the capacity to be one personality and then another. With Yves Saint Laurent, the woman could be a woman, but without it having to be in a cliche and stereotyped way – you could be feminine in a tuxedo.” She sees the same spirit in YSL Beauty today. “You can feel that strength in the perfumes — even when it’s a flower, it’s never heavy; it’s never a caricature of a flower,” she says. “It’s about beauty as a weapon of seduction.”