At Les Petits Prödiges, our main mission is to encourage you as much as possible to consume healthier and more responsible cosmetics for you and the environment, but that's not all...
Beyond a clean beauty routine, we advise you to adopt a whole daily lifestyle that will lighten your mind as well as our beloved planet.

Whether we are an entrepreneur, an employee, a stay-at-home parent, or in any other sometimes draining profession, we have all, at one point or another in our lives, wanted to slow down the pace of this perpetual excitement that is life.
What if we definitively stopped this endless quest to truly dedicate ourselves to this symbiosis of body and earth, that is, the slow life?

Okay, the Slow Life sounds good, but what exactly is it?

Slow vs. Fast

Slow life is a lifestyle that opposes fast living. The principle is to regain control of your schedule and live at the pace of the planet's resources.
So we say goodbye to frenetic days, but beware, there's no question of marginalizing yourself! It's a way of life that involves immersing oneself in the physical environment to reconnect with nature.

It is indeed an "art of living" that is not the easiest to adopt, which is why we are here to help you find your way. It is still 2019, and it is surely no secret to you, but our planet is in danger, and the success of slow life is not a coincidence.

Need vs. Want

Before giving you advice on how to adopt this lifestyle, it is necessary to understand its fundamental principles before being able to appropriate them. The first and most important is to differentiate between need and want.

It is important to go back to the root of societal decline regarding the environment and our economic system. The slow life means returning to essentials and thus adopting a rhythm consistent with our long-term needs and no longer basing our choices on fleeting desires. A nuance not to be overlooked: focusing on one's needs does not mean putting one's happiness aside. We simply prioritize happiness over fleeting desires that very (and too) often push us to consume.

Today, all of us have been trapped in the vicious circle of overconsumption which, contrary to common belief, affects the population as much as the environment.
Differentiating between our needs and wants, as well as between our happiness and temporary consumer impulses, means rethinking where and how we find pleasure. Our societal model has created ephemeral pleasures and desires that force the repetition of satisfaction and only falsely contribute to happiness.
By adopting the slow life, we gradually relearn to be happy through simplicity by replacing "material" with "necessary."

We suggest you try this little exercise: take 10 minutes to lie in the grass, look at the sky, listen to the birds, and feel gratitude for what surrounds us. This is a ten-minute break we are no longer used to taking; it's time for ourselves. Taking care of yourself doesn't just mean buying a new lipstick or any new product; it also means putting yourself in a situation to appreciate the simplicity of a moment that takes us away from daily life and brings us closer to ourselves and nature.

The slow life is therefore about experiencing intense happiness by observing and becoming aware of your environment by giving time to time, hence the term slow.
For a less abstract concept, we suggest you familiarize yourself with Maslow's Pyramid, which concisely summarizes our psychological, physiological, and social needs. Note that overconsumption does not appear there...

That said, in addition to being a state of mind, the slow lifestyle involves practices applicable to everyday life. It is entirely possible to start this lifestyle by changing some of our habits, which are not always well-thought-out and considerate of our well-being and that of our planet. Let us enlighten you.

Our 7 practical tips

1. Do one task at a time

It's well known and widespread: in an age where smartphones are everywhere and invade our daily lives, we think we can perform two or even several tasks simultaneously. But in truth, it's just an illusion of being more efficient and faster, because multitasking is extremely tiring. By sometimes engaging two distinct areas of our brain, we tire our nervous system and therefore our body. It is better to concentrate on one task at a time instead of combining them.

For example: At breakfast, focus on your surroundings and the act of eating, rather than diving into your emails before you even get to work! Take the time to awaken your body and brain!

2. Meditate

“If you can’t find peace here and now, where and when will you find it?” Ask yourself this question, and if, like us, you don’t find the answer, meditation is probably one of the first steps to take to find peace with yourself.

No need to be an expert: there are dozens of books that will guide you, such as Philippe Roch's Méditer dans la nature. For the more connected, there are also apps available on your smartphone that require only a few minutes of your time per day to try to make a difference. So download Petit Bambou, Headspace or Mind.

3. Listen to yourself and others

4. Awaken your senses by developing your creativity

To take your time to reconnect with yourself and your personal abilities, try doing things with your hands or any kind of creative activity that allows you to disconnect from the digital world and focus on what you love to do, what you want to do, and especially what you give yourself time to do.

5. Swap city walks for nature walks

It's good to live among trees, animals, and clean, unpolluted air. So if we all know that pollution in cities is rampant and causes all sorts of diseases (respiratory and cardiovascular disorders, worsens heart and lung diseases, increases the risk of lung cancer...), why don't we more regularly enjoy nature and its benefits?

Just as our eyes sometimes need a break from screens, our bodies need a break from all the pollution we inflict on them.

6. Slow food

7. Slow cosmetics

Fewer bottles, less spending, nobler and healthier products... There are only good reasons to adopt minimalism in your bathroom! By looking at some figures from the Slow Cosmétique association, we realize the urgency of changing our cosmetic habits. The situation is serious:

- 75,000 tons of cosmetic and hygiene product packaging are thrown away each year.
- €965 are spent on cosmetics per household per year.
- 1,000 cosmetics with undesirable substances were identified by the "UFC-Que-Choisir" association in 2017.

In other words, we consume too much, and not well enough.


The solution offered to us with slow cosmetics is simply to return to the essentials. Failing to consume less, we consume better, meaning we consume more ecological, healthier, smarter, and also more reasonably priced products. Slow cosmetics works in parallel with Slow food; the idea is to favor local brands with products that have a reasonable carbon footprint!

For those who have time and like Do It Yourself, it is increasingly common to make your own cosmetics. There are kits for making them, with healthy products, usually zero waste, and it's also a pretty cool manual activity!

For those in a hurry, we opt for products that effectively combine the winning trio of cleansing/moisturizing/protection that the skin needs.

For example, you have the Les Petits Prödiges multi-purpose balm : a 100% natural balm that can replace at least 7 cosmetic products!