Beauty’s best innovations don’t always chase the next big thing. This issue celebrates enduring icons, thoughtful craftsmanship, and modern classics – from a fragrance created for a queen nearly five centuries ago to design-forward home scents, rose-powered skincare, and even a dog shampoo worthy of your vanity.
Can a new flower-powered Dior moisturizer really turn back time?
Christian Dior famously loved roses. He bedecked gowns with hand-sewn fabric petals and designed bodices to mimic the shape of rosettes. His sister, French Resistance heroine Catherine Dior (the OG ‘Miss Dior’), cultivated centifolia roses on her farm for use in his perfumes. But could Monsieur Dior ever have imagined that scientists would one day biohack a rose from his childhood home into a skincare ingredient capable of potentially reversing the aging process? The man was a dreamer, but probably not.
The Rose de Granville was discovered growing on the grounds of Les Rhumbs, the clifftop villa in Normandy where Dior was born. The house’s botanists noted its resilience to the rugged terrain and salty sea air and, upon analyzing it, discovered that the rose contained a multitude of phytochemicals that could benefit skin. After seven hybridizations over the course of 15 years of study, these properties have been maximized. The Rose de Granville, which contains more than 120 active molecules with efficacy in skincare, is now the first and only rose grown specifically for use in cosmetics.
Dior beauty aficionados may recognize that the Rose de Granville has been the secret sauce in the brand’s Prestige range for a few years. But in the reinvented Dior Prestige La Crème (available in two textures), the flower’s powers have been enhanced to an even more extraordinary degree. Advanced extraction methods have allowed Dior’s scientists to draw out a spectrum of micronutrients from the rose’s petals, fruit, and stem, which— when combined with two powerful anti-aging peptides to create the patented Rosapeptide-3 complex—make the new Prestige La Crème three times more powerful than its predecessor.
In fact, according to a Dior study based on the analysis of more than 300,000 cells and 12,000 genes, Rosapeptide-3 can reverse the biological age of skin cells by 10 years. This doesn’t necessarily mean that slathering on this moisturizer is going to make you look a decade younger, but using it consistently will prompt skin cells to behave like they did back when Beyoncé’s Lemonade dropped – strengthening cell-to-cell communication, reducing inflammation, and stimulating collagen production.
You could do a deep dive into the technologies like thermo-crystallization and electro-magnetic extraction that brought this cream to life, or read about the impressive Skin Longevity Compass devised by Dior’s coterie of 19 international scientists to map out 15 hallmarks of aging, should you be so inclined. But the proof is in the pudding: the real beauty of Prestige La Crème is the way it glides onto the skin. A micro-filler component, composed chiefly of rose waxes, immediately smooths out wrinkles and gives skin a soft-focus gleam. And the benefits, as Dior’s scientific communication director Virginie Couturaud points out, are more than skin deep:“When you take care of your skin,” she says, you take care of your mind.” What better reason to stop and slather on the roses?
from left: Villa Les Rhumbs in Normandy, Christian Dior’s childhood home; The designer as a boy, circa 1910
Taken from 10 Magazine USA Issue 7 – HERITAGE, LEGACY, FUTURE – out September 18! Order your copy here.
Photography courtesy of STOKLOSA FOR PARFUMS CHRISTIAN DIOR
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