Liquid Light: La Prairie's New Illuminating Miracle

If you’ve got redness, brown spots and greyness, that’s not radiance. One scientist tells us how these pearls in a bottle will roll out new illuminance for your skin

At a level like the one La Prairie is working at, things really get exciting on the technological front. The brand’s latest brightening product, the White Caviar Illuminating Pearl Infusion ($850), combines the latest and the greatest in skincare innovations and technology to tackle dark spots caused by sun damage, redness from inflammation and dullness from pollution. We picked the brains of Dr Daniel Stangl, the brand’s Director of Innovation, about the White Caviar Illuminating Pearl Infusion and how it’s changing the brightening game.

What’s most interesting about the new White Caviar Illuminating Pearl Infusion?

The design of the pearls is exciting: It doesn’t just protect the active ingredients – the pearl itself is an active that protects skin from pollution in the air while delivering the ingredients to the skin. The formula goes hand in hand with the packaging. We have a dual-chamber system to keep the ingredients apart from each other to ensure their stability. I’m not a packaging designer or engineer, and it’s amazing how many parts we have in one bottle. There are sophisticated mechanisms that dispense, mix and deliver the product.

Vitamin C is an industry standard ingredient for brightening. What’s new about it in this White Caviar Infusion?

Pure Vitamin C is almost impossible to stabilise, especially if it’s exposed to light. Here, we have a modified form – a tetraisopalmitate in the ester form – that’s activated by the skin’s enzymes. This is our way of stabilising the tricky ingredient.

Can you tell us more about the other active ingredient, Diglucosyl Gallic Acid?

DGA is an exciting multi-functional ingredient that has seven to eight activities. It’s an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and inhibits the signalling pathway of melanin production. It’s great to just focus on a few potent ingredients with high activity profiles that do a lot and work on their stability and concentration. You get a lot of benefits and it’s an approach I personally love.

What skincare innovations are you personally excited by?

In the past we’ve only focused on two layers of the skin – the epidermis and dermis – but now we know that on top of the epidermis there are microorganisms called microbiota. That interaction of the microbes that live on our skin will be a big trend in the next ten years. There’s growing awareness in consumers that our skin isn’t sterile – we’re colonised by billions of microorganism. It’s not nasty, we need it for healthy skin!