French Pharmacies

There are small pharmacies every few blocks in Paris, easily visible via these neon-green cross signs. Prescription and over-the-counter medicines aren’t sold in supermarkets and other outlets like they are in the US, although there are moves to change that and allow sales in supermarchés and hypermarchés (which people rightly predict would be the death knell for independent pharmacies). But for now, the neighborhood pharmacy is the first stop if you have minor symptoms, not the doctor’s office. Pharmacists offer advice and suggest simple treatments and advise when it’s time to call the doctor. They can usually steer a needy tourist to a nearby physician. They function somewhat like the advice nurses of some US health plans, such as Kaiser.

Now for the girlie stuff: There are a large number of French beauty products that are sold as topical skin treatments, usually in simple packaging, at pharmacies rather than at cosmetic counters. Some are now available in the US, like LaRoche-Posay, but most are not.  Beauty blogs trade French product names with each other as if dabbling in an underground cult economy. They often have medical sounding names like the one below:

The product availability varies widely from pharmacy to pharmacy, since these are small, independent entities. For the best selection of beauty products, head to a large ‘parapharmacie‘. A free-standing parapharmacie is not required to have a pharmacist on staff and doesn’t sell prescription or over-the-counter medicine. They often have cheaper prices on beauty products than those sold in a pharmacy.  Some larger facilities have both a pharmacy section and a separate parapharmacie section. The mecca of Paris parapharmacies is the famous City-Pharma in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It has the best prices in Paris with a huge selection of products and narrow, crowded aisles. This is not a place for casual browsing; do that ahead of time in other less crowded pharmacies. Go to City-Pharma armed with a list and a high tolerance for crowds.