Car crash yielded passion

When Ange Trahern looked in the mirror at age 17, a beautiful teen stared back. A year later, the reflection wasn't as kind. A scar snaked from her right eyelid to the corner of her mouth, a stamp of a car crash that injured the Burlington native. "It was devastating - absolutely devastating" says Trahern, now 31. Trahern underwent multiple surgeries over a year and a half. She became a skin-care junkie, trying nearly every product on the market in hopes of helping her skin heal. She spent a lot of time in front of the mirror.

"What I realized is women every day go through an emotional process every time they look in the mirror and they're not happy with their skin," she said.

The crash led Trahern into the skin-care industry, where she's spent the past nine years developing and marketing skin-care products. This past year she designed her own anti-aging line, Bieux Skin.

So far, the line offers two products: 24 Hour Treatment Moisturizer and Power Lift & Repair Serum.

The moisturizer, which comes in a 2-ounce tube and sells for $97, is for all skin types and is designed to be used only once daily, in the morning. The serum, which comes in a package of six vials and sells for $125, repairs and rebuilds collagen.

The line recently launched on bieuxskin.com, and it's also available at sephora.com and the Colorado Springs Sephora store inside JCPenney at 3650 New Center Point.

"I'm really, really happy to be in a place where I'm at, and there's no way I would be there if that accident had not happened," Trahern says. "There's no possible way I would have become this passionate about any other industry or any other business."

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0152 or melissa.cassutt@gazette.com