The SCIENCE of LUXURY
Lift your spirits with a new skincare breakthrough from Chanel. By Sunitha Thayaparan.
adiating the classic brand DNA of the French fashion house that made an icon of the LBD (the little black dress) and pearls du jour, is none other than Marie-Hélène Lair, director of international scientific communications, scheduled to take a select crew of editors through the finer points of distinction of Le Lift: Chanel’s newest luxury cream range. The series includes Le Lift Crème, Le Lift Crème Fine, and Le Lift Crème Riche, and while there are subtle points of distinction, the underlying principle is that each allows a woman the luxury of being completely herself in her preferred beauty regime.
“What we’re talking about here, is something radically different from what we’ve seen with, say, the richness of Sublimage or even the Hydra Beauty range,” begins Lair as she takes us through a series of light experiments designed to give the perfect sensorial experience of the cream. Le Lift is somewhat intuitive and using epigenetics to inaugurate “self-biology”, the new range allows women to define their own path to beauty. “At Chanel, we know that all women wear their age differently. So the Le Lift range is a firming and anti-wrinkle cream range created to fit each individual woman’s unique lifestyle and skincare concerns.” Lair explains that the visible signs of ageing appear at a different rate for all women and that the key to slowing down these signs of ageing is to increase the amount of youth proteins produced. Not only do these youth proteins decrease signs of ageing such as the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, but they help even out skin tone as well.
“Twelve years of research,” begins Lair, as editors sniff and play with the segregated textures of Le Lift in a serene lab assembled in Hong Kong for the launch, “resulted in an extremely efficacious extract from the edulis plant, the roots of which are particularly rich in protective and antioxidant molecules.” Breaking the science down to the simplest terms is an art in itself and Lair does it well. “Backed by its work with world-renowned anti-ageing specialist Professor Gerry Melino,