1937

When René-Maurice’s son-in-law Émile Mahler joined the business, he brought with him a wind of change. Émile Mahler had studied at the Paris Institute of Chemistry and learned about polycomponents in a talk given by a Polish chemist, Professor Przyleck, polycomponents being formulations comprised of proteins, fatty acids, lecithin and vitamins. Fired-up by the talk, Émile immediately began manufacturing the first Gattefossé-approved fatty acid esters and new emulsified excipient bases.

This marked the beginning of the company’s relationship with lipid chemistry. René-Maurice in Lyon and his nephew, Louis Schmuck, Commercial Director in Paris, would go on to persuade manufacturers to accept these brand-new ingredients. When Henri-Marcel Gattefossé had the ingredients tested by medics in Lyon, it was the start of another key activity for the business: dermatology.

Émile Mahler.

However, the first major step forward for Gattefossé in relation to lipid chemistry actually came a bit later and was related to interesterification.

The process of interesterification involved redistributing the fatty acids of plant oils and was first carried out in partnership with the SIO when the company was producing suppository base material at the start of the 1950s. With the support of Professor Naudet, Gattefossé then applied the process to the synthesis of fatty acid esters, replacing all or part of the glycerol with alcohol or hydrophilic polymers. The plant oil thus gained an “amphiphile” which could be used in more than just galenic formulation. It had biological uses and, they discovered, pharmacological ones, too. And that was how the Labrafil® range came to be.