Beauty brands turn to rare plants and precious materials to enhance luxury products
Alpine flowers, delicate orchids and Japanese pearl extracts power some of the latest anti-ageing formulas
Tiny flowers that blossom just below the icy summit of one of Switzerland's highest mountains. A shrub that survives the months-long dry season of Africa's Burkina Faso. Delicate orchids that thrive on the high steppes of northern India and China.
Excerpts from the latest issue of Weird and Wonderful Nature? Winners of the Plant of the Year Awards? No, these are a few of the rare and precious ingredients making their way into luxury skincare products and, their creators hope, on to our bathroom shelves.
As the quest for youthful-looking skin continues unabated, cosmetics brands are exploring farther, higher and deeper than ever before to find that miracle element that will erase wrinkles, restore radiance and lift our sagging jowls.
Some, like La Prairie, are heading for the hills. A team led by Dr Daniel Stangl, an active mountaineer and the Swiss skincare brand's director of innovation, recently discovered two so-called survivalist plants - saxifraga oppositifolia and soldanella alpina - thriving in the ice and snow of The Dom mountain.
"To be able to capture the youth-protecting properties and adaptive nature of the three survivalist plants and combine those with revolutionary technologies of modern skincare is exceptional," Stangl says.
"When it comes to the development of new products for La Prairie, no cost is spared, no research left undone, no frontier is left unexplored in our quest for agelessness," adds Lynne Florio, global brand president. "Our clients pay a premium for the best in their skincare, and they expect the highest level of performance."
Yves Saint Laurent researchers scaled Morocco's Atlas Mountains, where they discovered a particular strain of saffron, also known as "red gold", that is rich in skin-regenerating glycans. The resulting Or Rouge cream, available at Harrods for £275 (HK$3,499), will launch in Hong Kong in September.
Guerlain, for its part, has staked its claim on orchids, crisscrossing the globe to discover rare species to add to its Geneva-based Orchid Library.
Its newly released Orchidée Impériale Eye and Lip Cream draws on the age-defying powers of the Dendrobium chrysotoxum, or gold orchid, grown in the company's Tianzi Exploratory Nature Reserve on the mainland.
For its new Dreamskin "perfect skin creator", Dior turned to the opilia shrub, found in Burkina Faso, and the longoza, a flower growing in the tropical forests of southeast Madagascar.