Essential ingredients Keeping it real is the name of the game for Les Artisans Lao, writes Sally Pryor.
H
igh above an art gallery, in a small room in a narrow building off a side street in downtown Vientiane, is a humming laboratory.
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There, young Lao people in white lab coats hover over heating and cutting machines, surrounded by glass vials and bubbling oils. Shelves are crammed with brown bottles, many with handwritten labels. It could be a mad scientist’s lab, or a chemist’s workspace, except that the smell is just heavenly. There’s citronella, tea-tree and jojoba, for a start, and the busy-bee workers are trialling products to see how they perform as essential oils, soap, shampoo, lip balm and insect repellent.
This last is one of the company’s best sellers – one of several beautifully packaged cosmetic products that form part of a range by Les Artisans Lao, a company that makes natural skincare products, fragrances and handicrafts, including furniture and jewellery. Les Artisans Lao is the brainchild of Michel Saada, a French native who has been in Laos so long, he can’t ever imagine going back to his old life in France. It was more than 25 years ago that Saada left Paris, where he ran a restaurant, and fetched up in Vientiane. That was in 1993, back when Laos was just opening up to international tourism. It was a very different place then – no cars, no
