Geri Hirsch has been cheering for Doré since day one, and now it's our turn to cheer for her right back. Geri has done it all for as long as we've known her. She's built and scaled a media and commerce company, she was working in clean beauty before most people were using the term, she's mom to three kids, and she writes The In-Between, a Substack newsletter we open the minute it lands. And as of yesterday, she also has a new brand. Carte Blanche makes skincare and makeup hybrids, and she and her co-founder have spent the last two years deep in the beauty weeds building it. We're excited to celebrate Geri, Carte Blanche and to learn a thing or two about beauty from a real pro. Meet Geri!
What is your morning beauty routine?
I naturally wake up before everyone else, which gives me a little pocket of time that’s entirely my own. Sometimes I’ll lie in bed and think, sometimes I’ll meditate, sometimes I’ll just enjoy the fact that no one needs anything from me yet. It’s less about having a perfect morning routine and more about having a little space before the day takes off. Because once 7 a.m. hits, it’s full-on with three children: breakfast, packing lunches, getting everyone dressed and ready and, ideally, out the door with the correct shoes on the correct feet.
Beauty-wise, my mornings are all about feeling pulled together without having to overthink it. Carte Blanche Multi-Hyphenate does a lot of the heavy lifting because it’s clinically proven skincare, mineral SPF, sheer tint and a lit-from-within glow all in one step. Then it’s concealer where I need it, brows, a little color and something on my lips. I love beauty, but at this stage of my life, I also really love efficiency.
And your evening routine?
At night, I’m ready to come all the way down. I cook dinner for our family, then it’s the whole nighttime circuit of showers, books and bed and more often than not, I’m in my pajamas by the time my kids are in theirs. From there, I’ll do my skincare, put my phone in another room and get into bed with a great book or a show. That little stretch of the night when everyone is asleep, my phone is somewhere else and nothing is being asked of me has become one of my favorite rituals. It’s when I can fully switch off.
What products do you keep in your bag?
About seventeen things my children have handed me to hold, a lipstick or two, sunglasses and wipes for sticky hands.
How do you define beauty?
I really believe authenticity is the highest vibration of beauty. There’s something incredibly beautiful about a person who shows up as they are.
When do you feel most beautiful?
When I feel like myself. Usually that means I’ve slept, moved my body, showered, had a coffee, put on a little makeup and got dressed. But it’s also when I’m laughing really hard, outside with my family, working on something that makes me feel alive, or just genuinely happy. I think the older I get, the less beauty feels like how I look and the more it feels like how fully I’m inhabiting my own life.
You just launched a new beauty brand, Carte Blanche. Tell us about it!
Carte Blanche has been almost two years in the making, and it started with a very simple question: is there actually something missing?
My co-founder, Sarah Tallman, is one of the best formulators in beauty, and we had worked together before, she made incredible formulas and I built the world around them. Years later, we started talking about our own routines, our pain points, how our skin and our lives had changed, and what we genuinely couldn’t find.
Carte Blanche came out of those conversations. We’re raising the standard for hybrids: clinically proven skincare and makeup, put together on purpose, for real skin and real life. Our first product, Multi-Hyphenate, is skincare, mineral SPF, sheer tint and a lit-from-within glow in one uncomplicated step and it’s clinically proven to visibly reduce hyperpigmentation, sun spots and age spots over time.
It’s very much inspired by the people we’re creating for which is every women doing a hundred things at once, beauty should be able to keep up.
And we have to ask, what’s your favorite address in France?Le Château des Alpilles in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It’s one of those places that feels almost suspended in time, beautiful, romantic, unfussy and quintessentially French. Close second...sitting in Paris with a coffee, people watching for hours with nowhere to be.
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