Mind-Body Multitasking with Skincare Entrepreneur NATALIE FRANZ

With 032c in hand, makeup artist and skincare entrepreneur Natalie Franz does a mind-body multitask.

When it comes to glowing skin, Vitamin D and fresh air are just as important as the right primer. Finding your way to a middle ground between caked-on bronzer and au naturale is a veritable gauntlet, one that make-up artist Natalie Franz is able to effortlessly glissade her way through. Pictured here on the roof of her offices at Hamburg’s harbor, she makes the most of an outdoor recess by fusing it with her reading time. After touring the world and doing makeup for stars such as Lady Gaga, Jennifer Connelly, and R.E.M., Franz is now a skincare entrepreneur, joining an industry that melds multibillion-dollar revenues with age-old occult secrets.

For dynamite skin glow, Cleopatra bathed in milk and rose petals, while the Geisha preferred a facial scrub consisting mainly of nightingale droppings. Beauty acolytes of Queen Elizabeth swallowed tapeworms, while Marilyn Monroe was rumored to just douse herself with Chanel No. 5 before bedtime. Standing on the shoulders of giants, Franz’s answer is simplicity. Her company Magicstripes produces a line of face masks and invisible eye-lifting strips, which are becoming all the rage in the surgery-averse sections of the jet-set crowd. Franz herself discovered the tiny strips on a trip to Japan, while in search of a pharmacy treatment to cure her jet-lagged eyes.

Born in Ukraine, Franz’s fascination with the power of powder began in her mother’s dressing room at the ballet in Kiev: “I spent a lot of my childhood at the theater watching her and the other actors getting ready, doing their makeup, and transforming. Makeup and its transformational power were very present in my childhood already,” she remembers. The secret to supple fascia, however, remains quite simple. And it is also a family secret. Franz reveals, “My grandma is 95 and does a tapping massage on her face every night – she looks amazing.”