EYES ON THE PRIZE

Notorious for betraying early signs of ageing, the delicate eye area now has a new ally in La Prairie’s latest formula, one with its sights firmly fixed on lifting. By Remy Rippon.

Notorious for betraying early signs of ageing, the delicate eye area has a new ally in La Prairie’s latest formula, one with its sights firmly fixed on lifting.

FOR SUCH A small section of the face, the eye area can be rather bossy. Firstly, each of these delicate sectors of skin houses 22 muscles, which ironically, never sleep. Moreover, the eye’s surrounding skin is more delicate and thinner than the rest of the face, which is why common bugbears, like dark circles or puffiness, consistently show up. And, unlike other regions of the face, there are fewer oilproducing sebaceous glands, which can make the eye area prone to dehydration and dryness. Even the most vital and basic action of blinking – which on average we do 10,000 times a day – makes it one of the most unique and problematic zones for fine lines and collagen depletion. High maintenance is an understatement.

“Your general skincare regimen is not designed for the eye area,” says Dr Jacqueline Hill, director of strategic innovation and science for La Prairie, drumming home another eye-opening truth. In fact, the eyes have long presented a unique set of challenges for skincare formulators. The reason? While the surrounding skin would, of course, benefit from nourishing, hydrating and protective formulations, loading eye creams with active ingredients can be problematic and occasionally even irritating for anyone who uses them daily. “When you have concerns like puffiness, or dark circles, the products that treat the rest of your face have not been designed to treat these concerns, so that’s just one of the reasons why you need separate products for this area,” explains Hill. “The texture and ingredients need to be adapted.”

To that end, Hill and her Zurich-based team have spent years developing the luxury brand’s latest innovation, Skin Caviar Eye Lift. An extension of the wildly successful Liquid Lift Serum – currently the best-selling La Prairie product in Australia and globally – the brand’s latest eye formulation aims to offer the same lifting and tightening benefits as the original while also addressing eye-specific concerns including laugh lines, under- eye bags and dark circles.

“We’ve always considered the eye area important,” says Hill of the Swiss brand’s decision to offer a dedicated eye formula focussed on lifting. “But we’re really seeing that it’s a main concern for women.” According to a 2015 study of more than 200 women over 40, under-eye bags and crow’s feet were among the top three skin concerns, with researchers also concluding that “although all wrinkles

deepened with increasing age, the strongest correlations were found with crow’s feet [and] under eye”.

According to Hill, the eyes are coming into focus for good reason. “You can be someone who has kind of muddled through your life with great skin, but there’s no getting around the eye area. It will tell you if you’re tired,” she warns.

Where the complexion is concerned, you’ve probably seen a host of these sculpting, lifting and filling products trickle onto beauty shelves, purporting benefits to rival brawnier in-clinic treatments, but in characteristic La

Prairie fashion, the gravity-defying benefits of Skin Caviar

Eye Lift are two-fold. “There are two timings of lift,” says

Hill. The first phase is on application, whereby an

“invisible mesh” begins to form around the eye – tightening and contracting – to give an immediate eyeopening boost. “There’s a film-forming ingredient that we include in the formula … it’s a mechanical momentary effect that you see as soon as you apply it,” she explains.

While the initial upshot is as surprising as it is satisfying, those benefits will wash off, while the cumulative anti-ageing advantages persist. “It takes longer to rebuild collagen and the cellular matrix,” explains Hill. This remodelling on a cellular level, she says, comes with its challenges: specifically, how to infuse active ingredients – including the brand’s signature component – Caviar Premier – into a safe-for-eyes formula.

The answer lies in its packaging. Uniquely, the active ingredients are separated in twin chambers – one housing La Prairie’s iconic gold caviar beads and the other with a silk gel-cream emulsion spiked with plant extracts and peptides – which mingle once dispensed to maintain their kick. “We wanted the other active ingredients to work on the specific eye concern, because Caviar Premier is not specific for dark circles and puffiness for the eye area. So we’ve added these ingredients that work together for a 360 degree approach,” explains Hill. “When we develop new products we always want to combine very strong active ingredients. And occasionally, those active ingredients work better when they’re separated.”

Of course, there’s a protocol for how you should apply the eye serum, too. While the brand adheres to the golden ‘tap-don’t-stretch’ rule, to attain the complete lifting benefits, they also prescribe a gentle, upward massage technique that embraces the brow bone – a zone not immune to the pitfalls of gravity. “The brows are very important to frame the eyes and with age, they do sag,” says Hill. “We wanted to create a product to treat the full eye area.”

Continuing the brand’s full-circle approach, La Prairie commissioned a trio of female contemporary photographers to bring Eye Lift to life. The exhibition, coined Eyes in Focus, debuted at Swiss contemporary art fair Art Basel (just a short drive from La Prairie’s Zurich headquarters) and depicted works from Swiss artists Daniela Droz, Namsa Leuba and Senta Simond.

“Luxury and art, they have always been interweaved,” says La Prairie CEO Patrick Rasquinet, delighted he’s able to combine his two passions. “It’s about the gaze, so the link to photography was obvious.”

While its rich history is interlocked with art – FrenchAmerican artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s use of vivid colour throughout her work influenced the brand’s original cobalt blue jar – skincare remains its core focus, and more so than ever, the eye category. “We want to be the expert in ageing, so we have to start from the eyes,” says La Prairie global chief marketing officer Greg Prodromides. “It is an extremely engaging category, and it’s the most expressive part of our body. At the end of the day, when you look at somebody, what do you see?”

La Prairie Skin Caviar Eye Lift, $655.

“When we develop new products we always want to combine very strong active ingredients”