Stunning alpine scenery, expertly crafted watches, the world’s finest chocolate – Switzerland is synonymous with beautiful landscapes and masterful craftsmanship. Thanks to La Prairie, it’s also a symbol of world-class skincare.
The story begins back in 1931, when Dr. Paul Niehans started his groundbreaking work in cellular therapy at Clinique La Prairie, a Swiss clinic that has come to be known as a pristine sanctuary of innovation.
Since Niehans’ breakthrough research was published in 1960, La Prairie’s evolution has been punctuated by industry firsts, focusing on supremely high-quality ingredients, including the introduction of active ingredients sourced from caviar.
A symbol of decadence, pleasure and refined celebration since the time of the Tsars, delicate beads of caviar have always been associated with luxury, but it was La Prairie that first interpreted this into indulgence for the skin.
The house’s caviar is infused with time itself, formed in the Swiss Alps in pools enhanced with alpine spring water that has seeped through rocks for months. Having undergone this natural filtration process, the water is enhanced with the rich minerality of this ancient landscape, collecting in the perfectly balanced, closely monitored pools to create the best possible caviar.
It’s this extraordinary quality that powers the brand’s reimagination of its first gravity-defying serum: Skin Caviar Liquid Lift. This industry-leading formulation was conceived as a tribute to the iconic beads of the Skin Caviar Collection, and has been formulated by merging the brand’s two most potent and advanced caviar ingredients for the first time to create one unparalleled serum.
Continuing the theme of masterful Swiss engineering, even the packaging is a work of technological prowess; the sculptural, minimalist cobalt blue flacon not only looks magnificent on any dressing table, it also features a breakthrough mechanism that activates the caviar beads and blends them into a silky serum. With one click, the beads are transformed before the eyes so that it truly feels like the work of magic.
Indeed, the formula is something close to a youth-prolonging magic potion. The new Skin Caviar Liquid Lift merges La Prairie’s two advanced caviar ingredients in a serum. Caviar Premier features a mix of biomolecules, including lipids, proteins, peptides, DNA, carbohydrates and their building blocks, such as amino acids, nucleotides and sugars. These are blended with La Prairie’s biomimetic Caviar Peptide that has been designed based on the amino acid sequence of a specific caviar protein.
La Prairie’s scientists have also developed Caviar Absolute, a highly concentrated form of caviar which is obtained using an extraction process to isolate the two most abundant ingredients in caviar – caviar oils and caviar proteins. The formula is further enhanced with La Prairie’s iconic Exclusive Cellular Complex, which gives energy back to the skin.
To source a unique Swiss caviar in the Swiss Alps, La Prairie has entered into a collaboration with a specialized Swiss artisanal cultivator. The short distance between the sturgeon habitat and La Prairie’s Swiss laboratories in which the ingredient transformation process takes place guarantees an optimal quality of caviar ingredients.
The two key ingredients at its core are Caviar Premier and Caviar Absolute. The former augments natural caviar extract with ‘caviar mimetics’, which push the boundaries of its performance, while the latter is created by isolating oils and proteins (the two most abundant ingredients in caviar) to capture their power. While Premier gives skin an unrivalled lift, Absolute works to visually enhance the volume that can be lost with age.
Together, the potent ingredients work to undo the inescapable effects of time and gravity, visibly lifting, resculpting contours and recapturing harmony and smoothness of tone and texture. The advanced formulation is further enhanced by La Prairie’s Exclusive Cellular Complex, which targets essential cells to refresh and breathe new energy into them.
Housed in two separate chambers, the caviar beads and milky emulsion are freshly blended with a press of the activation button for a seamless transformation. The chrome pump diffuses the perfect dose of the serum. Apply AM/PM to face, neck and décolleté, avoiding eye area.
Like all La Prairie products, it’s a pleasure to use, melting into skin like silk and immediately granting a signature tensing sensation to give an instant lift.
With continued use over time, the skin appears increasingly lifted and firmed, with elasticity enhanced and fine lines and wrinkles noticeably minimised, for a more harmonious look. To further enhance the gravity-defying effects? Just layer the serum over with La Prairie’s Skin Caviar Luxe Cream or Skin Caviar Luxe Sleep Mask.
French artist Cyril Lancelin has created an immersive installation that plays with an accumulation of metal gold spheres inspired by the aesthetics of La Prairie’s signature caviar bead: simple and pure in shape as an evocation of beauty. With the repetition of the spheres, the artist duplicates the unit of measure of space and time, giving the piece a sense of temporality. Aligned in stacks, the spheres appear to emerge from the floor in an ascension, defying gravity.
The sphere evokes perfection and purity. It is also, of course, the form of the globe on which we live. This form transcribes for me a communion between nature and technology.
Cyril Lancin
The installation 96 Spheres is made of 14 columns of golden steel spheres. Viewers can enter the installation and experience it kinetically. In the reflections of the golden pillars, the viewer is central without playing the principal role.
In honour of the exceptional landscape and timeless beauty of Switzerland, La Prairie has chosen to continue its support of the glacier-related research being conducted by the Glaciology Section at ETH Zurich. Donating a proportion of online proceeds to the protection of glaciers, the house hopes to preserve and protect this endangered landscape – and its greatest source of inspiration.
La Prairie Skin Caviar Liquid Lift is available in a 50ml flacon at La Prairie Institutes and selected stores worldwide. Come into the beautiful world of La Prairie.
Yakymour 