To reverse all eight signs of ageing, Caudalie’s Premier Cru series harness one handy, eco-extracted — Honokiol.
Australian biologist David Sinclair is a living legend in medical circles, the beauty industry and among cosmetic-addicts. After all, this is the man who was named the “Longevity Guru” by Time Magazine US and he also won the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction from the American Federation for Aging Research in 2018.
Caudalie has thus roped in Sinclair’s help and their brief was to develop an enzyme with an active ingredient that could address ageing in the most natural way possible. The active ingredient had to be eco-extracted to reduce energy from more conventional scientific methods, be as stable as possible to extend its shelf life and act directly on the skin’s proteins — building blocks to skin looking youthful.
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The first step for Sinclair was to develop an epigenetic enzyme named TET (Ten-Eleven Translocation) that could “turn off” (to explain epigenetics in the simplest term possible) the switches that accelerate ageing. If one wants a clearer picture, ageing causes our cells’ DNA to prevent the expression of certain genes, which in turn causes the genes to produce fewer proteins.
To boost the enzyme to its fullest potential, Sinclair derived that Honokiol — a polyphenol isolated from the bark, seed cones, and leaves of trees from Mongolia — worked the best. Honokiol is an already-existing natural agent for cancer prevention and therapy, but it scores highly on the anti-oxidation charts in the context of skincare.
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While Sinclair is already familiar with what causes skin ageing — oxidation, sun exposure, smoking and artificial light — the final step was to consider how TET could work with Caudalie’s active ingredients. The French brand’s products already do the deed with a component like grape seed polyphenols (preventing wrinkles and blocking free radicals), natural hyaluronic acid (skin plumping) and tightening sugars (wrinkle reducing), but when TET is combined with resveratrol (a Caudalie-patented, derived ingredient from vine shoots), it could directly act on the skin’s youth proteins to “switch off” the bad enzymes and “flip” the acceleration button on the good.
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One can do many things with the Caudalie Premier Cru series — the set includes a dense, nourishing cream; a serum that immediately tightens the skin and an eye cream with a massaging nozzle. It serves as an additional skincare routine when one notices things up north going south or as a fuss-free starter kit for anti-ageing.
It is also a joy to use come morning or night (the series’ scent is a composition of 100% natural ingredients like Damask rose and benzoin absolute) or as a pre-starter skincare set to fight dark spots and then reduce everything from deep wrinkles to fine lines. One just needs to remember that the capsules are refillable; one is saving 3,120 tonnes of packaging and 18,000 kilograms of glass each time he does it.
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