“In the quest to create more effective (or merely more expensive) skin-care lines, the list of esoteric ingredients grows ever more rarefied. White lotus, grapeseed oil, rice, copper and algae are just a few of the substances that have been touted as beneficial to the luminosity and firmness of one’s skin. Although it is hard to be fazed by the cosmeceutical wonders of any one new thing, every once in a while something stops the leery but eternally hopeful beauty-product consumer in her tracks.
Such was the case when I happened into Henri Bendel the other day, and a tan, taut-faced man who bore a slight resemblance to Valentino stroked a dab of moisturizer onto my hand. “Look,” he said. “Compare that hand with the other.” And, indeed, the treated hand appeared to be smoother, less red, altogether more like the kind of hand you’d be proud to proffer in greeting. It was at that moment that the product’s German creator, Detlef Fuhrmann, stepped forward to explain that the transformative ingredient in his antiaging line Immupure was nothing less than colostrum, the first breast milk that protects newborns from infection.
I suddenly had a vision of nursing mothers working on an assembly line, producing milk only for it to be whisked away by Herr Fuhrmann, who assured me that the colostrum came from cows. Since I was a child of humans and one who had not been breast-fed, could it be as useful to me as to my bovine cousins? The products promised not only to exfoliate, reduce wrinkles and revitalize my skin but also to to repair it! Could that be?
As the days pass, and I dutifully cleanse and moisturize, I imagine I can see the years falling away, leaving me in the cosmetic equivalent of swaddling clothes, time’s erosion undone and me glowing like a baby.”
