The Beauty Brands Powered by Hyper-Local, Super Ingredients
Skincare labels are increasingly seeking bioactive formulations. But is it just another marketing ploy?
Just outside of Reykjavik, you’ll find Iceland’s Blue Lagoon—those mythical, electric-blue hot springs in the center of desolate lava fields. Blue Lagoon is one of the Nordic island’s most sought-out destinations. It’s known for beauty and ethereal strangeness, and perhaps most of all, powerful skin-rejuvenating benefits. Juergen Teller famously shot Björk and her son there in the early ’90s, and more recently, everyone from Jay Z and Beyoncé to Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian, and icons of the beauty world like Isamaya French have traveled to the mineral-rich, milky-blue pools to bathe in their therapeutic, geothermal waters.
But the benefits go beyond an Instagram photo. Decades of research shows this one-of-a-kind, extreme environment—high in silica, salinity, and heat that makes its way from tectonic plates 2,000 meters below the earth’s surface—contains two unique, restorative forces that exist only there: the microcosm’s silica, and a single microalgae that can survive these conditions. “It’s like the perfect antiaging potion, because the microalgae induces synthesis of new collagen and also seems to be pushing to keep the skin barrier strong,” says Dr. Asa Bryndis Gudmundsdottir, lead research and development scientist at Blue Lagoon Iceland. Using this research, Dr. Gudmundsdottir and his team developed BL+ Complex, a patented bioactive that uses biomimicry to penetrate deep into the skin. BL+ Complex is the core ingredient in Blue Lagoon Skincare, the luxe beauty line known for lava, mud, and algae-enhanced masks; the incredibly moisturizing BL+ The Cream; and a serum combining BL+ Complex, hyaluronic acid, and vitamin C.
It turns out, Blue Lagoon Skincare isn’t the only beauty brand grounded in extraordinary bioactive ingredients. At the bottom of Lake Héviz in southwest Hungary, the Budapest-founded line Omorovicza sources mineral-rich water and glistening black mud, a biounique ingredient with a pH close to neutral that’s densely concentrated with magnesium and calcium. Biotech line Clark’s Botanicals recently launched the DNA-42 Clinicalift Serum, merging plant cell-derived exosomes with goji berry exosomes and Jasmine Catalyst Complex derived from the Amalfi coast (the serum promises to improve skin elasticity and firmness). Dior, meanwhile, uses golden grapes from the brand’s long-held vineyard Chateau d’Yquem for its L’Or de Vie line; the house explains that the Yquem vine combats oxidative stress. In the rainforest of the Azores, biotech company Ignae—a favorite of celebrity facialist Joanna Czech—works with camellia extracts from the Furnas Valley and other volcanic soil-grown plants in its nanotechnology. Sienna Miller used label’s Volcanic Clay mask before last year’s Met Gala—a product rich in collagen-boosting, local extracts.
Lake Hevis in western Hungary
“Environmental stressors often force organisms to produce more potent secondary metabolites, such as antioxidants,” explains Ignae’s founder, Miguel Pombo. “Because the flora here is exposed year-round to oceanic winds and thrives in volcanic soil (the result of 17th-century eruptions that blanketed the islands in ash), we knew this ‘biological enhancement’ would be present in our locally sourced ingredients.”
Still, the seductive visuals beg the question: what is the link between an ecologically niche ingredient and a product’s efficacy? Is a hyper-local botanical just another alluring marketing ploy? Or are there measurable impacts that translate to topical products, backed by the kind of research Dr. Gudmundsdottir does?
Lia Chavez—the Brookhaven, New York-based multimedia artist and visionary behind the botanical-derived line Hildegaard Haute Botanical Oils—owns the regenerative Mama Farm. She points to botanical intelligence as an answer to why incredibly local ingredients have an effect on product efficacy. Chavez tends 80 percent of the 70 different oil extracts that make up her facial oils herself, rewilding two acres of woodland behind her atelier with endangered medicinal plants and working with her friend and neighbor, Isabella Rossellini, to grow beautyberry, elderflower, and more. Chavez’s facial oils feature herbs like the antioxidant-rich American ginseng, the antibacterial lemon balm, and damask rose “cultivated by a fourth-generation farmer in the high-altitude Isparta-Burdur region of Turkey,” says Chavez. “Centuries of fungal networks have co-evolved with rose species in that soil, delivering phosphorus, zinc, and iron in precise bioavailable ratios no synthetic substrate can replicat. This matters enormously for the skin, because a rose grown in living, mineral-complete soil carries the full spectrum of its therapeutic compounds rather than a nutritionally compromised approximation of them.”
Irene Forte, the English-Italian heiress of the Rocco Forte hotels and the mind behind her eponymous skincare line, has been working with hyper-local ingredients in her science-backed products for years. “I started with the olive oil that we produce from three different types of olives on the farm,” says Forte of her family’s regenerative farmland in Sicily, which provides olive oil to the historic properties’ Italian-led kitchens. “I was like, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could put it in a skincare product?” Her company blossomed with products “rich in omegas, vitamin E, and polyphenol: all the benefits that you get from the concept of the Mediterranean diet, too.”
“We make a neuropeptide from hibiscus seeds, which has been shown to relax muscles in the face,” Forte adds. “We call it nature’s Botox. But nature alone is absolutely not enough. I do think you need science to get the best out of nature.”
Although experts agree that a scientific approach benefits all parties involved, “the skincare business is sort of the wild, wild west,” Dr. Gudmundsdottir admits. Clinical studies measure whether people feel that a product impacted their skin, not actual impact in a measurable sense. More robust research like the type Dr. Gudmundsdottir’s doing at Blue Lagoon Skincare is often separate from the beauty industry’s day-to-day endeavors.
Nonetheless, Blue Lagoon is not alone in diving deeper into the mystery of its super ingredients. “We are preparing a peer-reviewed paper on a novel microalgae extract capable of neutralizing 100 percent of IL-1, one of the most influential proteins in the aging process,” Pombo says.
“A lot of people are always like, do the products really work? And I’m like, yes, we really see results in trials where there’s an actual, not only visible, but measurable instrument, measurable difference,” Forte notes. “Using science to unlock the best out of nature has always been our philosophy.”
