La Prairie’s New Collection Is Inspired by a Platinum Meteor Shower that Lasted 200 Million Years

What is the value of time? La Prairie has been pondering that question for nearly a century, since founder Dr. Paul Niehans, who earned the sobriquet “father of cellular therapy,” began experimenting with remedies for longevity in 1931 at the Clinique La Prairie in Montreux, Switzerland. 

Over the years, the heritage Swiss luxury house has lived at the forefront of beauty innovation, producing indulgent face creams and serums that introduce science into skincare and incorporate rarefied ingredients such as caviar, gold, and now platinum. The precious metal is the anchor of new the Platinum Rare Haute-Rejuvenation collection, the brand’s latest fountain-of-youth formula offered in a seven product range. 

Housed in an assortment of sculptural, amethyst-shaded vessels with enhanced platinum accents, the velvety creams and elixirs—perfumed with La Prairie’s signature scent—showcase a new science dubbed Haute-Rejuvenation. At the core of it is a cellular renewal process that smooths wrinkles, improves skin moisture, restores volume, and induces a vibrant glow. By invigorating epidermal stem cells, it— in effect—turns back time to more youthful skin.  

La Prairie’s Exclusive Cellular Complex is a life force for the skin. It uses biotechnological research to give new life and energy back to the very cells where beauty is born. It invigorates and nourishes epidermal stem cells to enable them to resume cellular renewal and functionality similar to that of young skin. 

“When we age, the skin’s natural rejuvenating capacity decreases, leading to the appearance of signs of aging,” says Dr. Jacqueline Hill, the brand’s global director of strategic innovation. “La Prairie’s Science of Haute-Rejuvenation seeks to specifically modulate and stimulate the skin’s natural network of interconnected rejuvenating processes to compensate for the age-related decrease of its performance.”

Another pillar of the brand’s history is art. To celebrate the launch of Platinum Rare–Haute Rejuvenation, La Prairie commissioned the acclaimed British composer Max Richter and Japanese artist Nobuhiro Nakanishi to collaborate on an immersive installation set to debut at this year’s West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai (Nov. 12-15). Richter masterminded a score for Nakanishi’s layer drawing Echo of Time, a sculptural work with a sequential photography series of the Swiss Alps at twilight. 

The duo was tasked to consider the essence of time and space, particularly a billion -year-long meteor shower responsible for bringing platinum to earth. For his contribution, Nakanishi traveled to Niederhorn peak in the Swiss Alps where he photographed a vibrant sunrise of blue, red, and purple—the colors that imbue Platinum Rare’s bottle design. “The colors dyed the mountains and at the same time, the sky awakened and became amethyst,” Nakanishi says of the scene. “The mountainous scenery in Switzerland is the perfect place to illustrate the notion of timeless nature through the clearness of the water, the air, and the reflection of light created by nature itself.” 

Richter’s melodic composition begins with pulsating choral strings that give way to an individual acoustic figure meant to stimulate the feeling of entering a new landscape. “It provokes a dynamic encounter with a new world and makes you feel alive,” he says. To Richter, time is mysterious and doesn’t always move at the same speed. “This is the kind of thing a piece of music can trigger: it can stop time or speed it up, it can make time feel more intense.” 

It’s a synergetic notion: Manipulating the effects of time is something La Prairie does best.