Caroline Lorinet knows just how important it is to get up again after you’ve been knocked down. She had to do that when being hit by a motorbike left her with a smashed-up face and almost ended her successful modelling career.
The resilience she developed then helped several decades later when she had to start over after her plans to launch a skincare range stalled.
Yet as devastating as those setbacks in her life have been, the Paris-born, Auckland-based model-turned-businesswoman believes in the end things have worked out for the best.
“Everything I’ve been through has made me who I am today,” she says. “I have learned a lot – including how to build endurance and perseverance.”
In her early twenties, Caroline was on track to become one of Europe’s top models. Discovered at 16 by a photographer on the beach in St Tropez, she was signed by an agency and went to the Seychelles to shoot a campaign for haircare company Wella.
“My photo went viral,” recalls Caroline, now 59. “I was in chemists and magazines everywhere. Then I did an advert for a coffee company and my face was on packets of coffee for five years, as well as buses and a poster in the Champs-Élysées. It was strange at first, but encouraging for me as a young model.”
By the mid 1980s, she was working for top agencies including Elite, which had Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington on its books, and appearing in magazines like Marie Claire and German Vogue. Then at 21, she was struck by a motorbike as she crossed a busy road.
Her face hit the concrete, leaving her cheekbone badly smashed. The reconstructive surgery involved having a metal rod inserted to hold her cheekbone together, protruding from her face for a month.
“I looked like someone from a horror movie and I didn’t know if it was going to make me look like I did before,” recalls Caroline.
“I was very traumatised.”
At the time, Caroline was newly married to Japanese model agency owner Yoshiyuki Kurokawa, who’d introduced her to Buddhism, and she says that gave her strength. “There was a life force within me that helped me to fight for my recovery.
“In hospital, I saw people who were really suffering and I realised beauty is not everything. It brought down my ego and made me a more compassionate person.”
The surgery was successful, but her confidence had taken a battering, so to try to ease back into modelling while rebuilding her self-esteem, Caroline went to work in Sydney. That led to a seven-month stint in New Zealand in 1991 and she fell in love with Aotearoa.
After appearing in local magazines and modelling for labels like Trelise Cooper, she and Yoshi had gone to Japan to work when they learned she was pregnant. “We thought New Zealand would be the best place for children, so we came back and I have been here ever since.”
Caroline has two sons, Yuki, now 30, and Nico, 28. She and Yoshi divorced, but have remained close friends. She modelled part-time, then her life changed direction when, after years of problems with sensitive skin, she had a severe allergic reaction to a cream prescribed by a dermatologist.
“I woke up in the night feeling like someone was burning my face,” she says. “I had blisters and it took me two years to recover. It left me with the same trauma I felt after the accident. I became scared to use skincare.
“I started researching skincare for sensitive skin and Yoshi said, ‘Why don’t you make your own?’”
Caroline raised $700,000 from investors to research, test and manufacture the products she wanted to make for herself and others with sensitive skin. She persuaded a top Australian cosmetic scientist to work with her and they came up a range of products. However, progress stalled when Caroline ran out of money to market her self-titled skincare. Her business took a further hit when Covid struck, but it gave her time to develop a natural hand sanitiser and remake her products.
“It’s taken 10 years and I’ve had to learn the hard way, but I’m finally ready to fly,” says Caroline, whose products are available online and in stores including Ballantynes. “I’m so proud of my skincare, that it combines New Zealand nature with French flair.”
Now also modelling again, Caroline is pleased that she has never given up. “I feel I’ve been given second chances and I’m going to make the most of them.”
For more about Caroline, visit carolinelorinet.com
