"BLEU DE SEL" KAZEMI x FRANCK CAZENAVE, an ode to naturalness, sea salt and the memory of the skin

Yasamin Kazemi, founder of Kazemi Cosmetics, and Franck Cazenave , a Basque painter, visual artist, performer, author, and curator originally from Biarritz, have joined forces for a collaboration celebrating the natural ingredients of KAZEMI skincare and Franck's artistic vision. For several months, they exchanged ideas and worked together, ultimately exploring a theme close to their hearts: the traces of time on the skin.

Time and life trace a silent map on our skin that no one can erase. What we call "wrinkles," "marks," or "imperfections" are merely witnesses to our passage: signs that we have lived, felt, and experienced. Skin matures as the individual matures: it softens, transforms, and opens itself to the world, losing some of its elasticity but gaining a depth that did not exist before.

Some marks are born from more intimate events: the stretch marks of a woman who has given birth, veritable furrows of a body that has expanded to welcome life; scars, fine or deep, reminders of a vulnerability faced. Each mark becomes a fragment of history inscribed in the living. The skin is not merely an organ: it is a memory. A surface that remembers.

Because ultimately, only the body knows how to measure time. Neither dates nor memories truly tell us how long we've been alive. The skin, however, remembers. It retains traces of the seasons we've lived through, the emotions we've felt, the trials we've endured. It records the world's movement upon us.

Behind this poetic imagery lies a scientific reality: wrinkles reside in the heart of the dermis , where collagen and elastin become scarce; stretch marks appear in the mid and deep dermis when it is stretched too quickly; scars bear witness to tissue that has rebuilt itself differently, sometimes from the epidermis , sometimes down to the dermis . Each mark corresponds to a layer, an affected area, an event that the skin does not forget.
The skin is a true biological archivist.

And that's also why we sometimes find it difficult to show ourselves. Our skin doesn't just age; it reveals what we ingest, what we feel, what we sometimes try to suppress. It reacts to stress, hormones, fatigue, and emotions. It expresses, directly, what we don't say. It is our visible memory, sometimes too visible.

In this sense, the skin becomes a living timeline, an open book reflecting our seasons, our transitions, our moments of strength as well as our vulnerabilities. There are times when we would prefer to conceal its pages. And others when we fully embrace this narrative, where each mark becomes the symbol of a metamorphosis, a rebirth, a story that we now choose to bring to light.

The memory of the skin is that truth which nothing can disguise: a language which tells us who we were, what we went through, and what we became.

Sea salt — white gold, a legacy of the Atlantic coasts

To continue this dialogue around traces, memory and living matter, Franck Cazenave and Yasamin Kazemi chose to anchor their collaboration in an element that is at once raw, ancestral and symbolic: sea salt .

Once a precious crystal, long nicknamed white gold , salt is an ancient material, shaped by the wind, the sun, and the slow evaporation of water. Still harvested by hand on the French coast, it carries within it a history spanning millennia. The salt used by KAZEMI comes from the Île de Ré , opposite La Rochelle , where Yasamin grew up. It's a return to his roots, an intimate, almost instinctive gesture.

This symbolism also resonates with Franck .
Both grew up on the shores of the Atlantic , steeped in the same light, the same wind, the same tides. This maritime heritage still runs through them: it infuses their way of creating, contemplating, and understanding the world. The sea has become their shared territory, a silent language that connects their worlds.

When we observe these pieces, something surprising appears:
They possess an almost scientific, molecular quality.
The crystals mingle with the pigments like living structures; the forms fragment, repeat, reinvent themselves. Each work becomes a microcosm, a miniature salt landscape, where one can discern an infinite number of points of view.

Each work is unique. Each tells a different story.
In a single room, one can perceive the mineral, the marine, the pigment, the cell, the light.
And suddenly, these shapes strangely remind us of our own: skin cells, their intimate architectures, their way of renewing themselves, repairing themselves, remembering.

A burst of nature, science, storytelling, a concentration of life in a rectangle of paper, like a microscopic mirror of the living landscapes that make us up.

For those who wish to visually discover this encounter between matter, salt and light, a selection of works from the collaboration is presented below.

To learn more about Franck Cazenave's work and artistic approach, visit his website: www.franck-cazenave.com.