What may well turn out to be a landmark moment for the beauty industry in Guyana occurred on Saturday June 11 when the locally-owned beauty establishment Cosmetics Beauty World opened a new store, O Boticário at the company’s 346 East Street, Cummingsburg premises.
With the local beauty and fashion industry having forged ahead by leaps and bounds in recent years, it is more than likely that the brand name being employed to launch this new venture will provoke gasps of delight from the hordes of beauty aficionados in Guyana. The word emanating from the beauty industry in Guyana is that O Boticário is ‘big time, ‘top of the line’ if you will and that the arrival of the brand here will do much to ‘big up’ the local style and fashion industry.
As the story goes the brand has its origins in 1977 “on a side street in Curitiba, a small city in the south of Brazil. We are told that a Pharmacist named Miguel Krigsner was in the process of designing an apothecary that would offer a “warm and welcoming experience to those seeking a more personalized approach to wellness.” O Boticário, so the story goes, was intended to be “a love note to the people of Brazil and to the beauty of the Earth and all that it provides. Hard work and dedication, it seems, eventually propelled the brand to the position of one of the world’s largest perfumery and cosmetics lines with an astonishing 3,000 plus locations across the vast land mass that is Brazil.
Credit for bringing Guyana into the big brand ‘big time, goes to the Brazilian-born Maisa Da Silva, ‘lured here by her Guyanese husband Dr. John DaSilva.
Speaking with Stabroek Business during the opening of the new store Maisa said that she had first sought a distribution partnership with the company two years ago which, it seemed might well have fallen through the cracks. In 2021, while attending a six-month Master of Beauty course in Brazil she met with the entity’s Director and got her second application approved. Understandably, she says that she is more than proud of the contribution that she is making to the beauty industry in Guyana.
The new distribution hub now having ‘taken root’ in Guyana, Maisa makes no secret of her anxiety to watch the fashion conscious soak up the scent.
Maisa is not exactly new to the local beauty industry. In 2014 she launched Cosmetics Beauty World, an outlet located at 13 Vlissengen Road, Newtown, Kitty.
Apart from being the second biggest Brazilian cosmetics company with more than 4,000 outlets in Brazil, Portugal, Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, the United States, Paraguay, Japan, France, Angola, Colombia and United Arab Emirates, O Boticário is the largest cosmetic franchise in the world, its main competitors being Natura, Avon Products and Jequiti.
