La Prairie’s White Caviar Essence Extraordinaire Reflects the Brilliance of Light

La Prairie knows that the cornerstone of beauty is light. For decades, glimmering light dancing and reflecting off the surface of Lake Geneva near the heritage Swiss house’s hometown of Montreux, in the rolling hills of Switzerland, has left a resounding impact on how its scientists have made deft use of novel ingredients to devise a highly sought-after suite of age-defying products. The brand’s latest innovation, White Caviar Essence Extraordinaire, channels the power of this uniquely Swiss phenomenon to achieve radiance on skin through the power of science-backed skincare and further cements La Prairie at the forefront of beauty innovation.

Skincare products often promise to achieve a glowing effect, but La Prairie’s White Caviar Essence Extraordinaire uses proprietary technology to illuminate skin at the highest level. To achieve this, it takes a multi-pronged approach to enhancing natural luminosity from the inside out. First, it increases hydration—the actual amount of water beneath the skin’s surface. Second, the formula’s actives boost collagen production, working to plump the skin’s appearance before gently exfoliating to promote a smoother, more light-reflecting surface. With all three elements working in tandem, skin achieves a glow unattainable from any other product.

Its patented active, Lumidose, is the most powerful illuminating molecule used in skincare today. Lumidose is an inhibitor of tyrosinase, the enzyme responsible for the formation of dark spots and discoloration. It works to fade darkness, uneven tone, and signs of aging faster than any other ingredient of its kind. Lumidose was found to be the most powerful illuminating active in 15 years of studies, which included more than 50,000 ingredients. For the first time, La Prairie has used innovative, double-encapsulation technology to deliver Lumidose to the skin for the most powerful illuminating effects achievable in skincare. White Caviar’s hero ingredient is Swiss Golden Caviar Extract, which supports natural collagen production to plump and firm the appearance of skin, creating a smoother surface for light to reflect from. The base of the formula is Swiss Golden Caviar Water, which carries the most delicate attributes of golden caviar and works to create a refreshing sensation upon application. 

The inspiration of light is clear from the formula to the components. Just like the Lumidose molecule is double-encapsulated, its ornate packaging follows suit with a sleek bottle-in-bottle design. It not only evokes sculpture, but helps protect the formula oxidation and preserves optimal efficacy over time. Each bottle is accented just below the cap with a chrome ring, adorned with a texture that replicates the very sensation of light reflecting off beads of water.

To celebrate the launch, La Prairie joined forces with Taiwanese dancer and new media artist Wen-Chi Su to choreograph a performance that poetically describes the encounter of water and light in visual terms. Before conceiving her performance, she traveled to Switzerland to experience the very sensation firsthand and found herself enamored with the verdant region’s picturesque peaks and valleys. Wen-Chi, the founder of new media performance collective YiLab, turned out to be an ideal partner. Her practice often reflects on how humans live in parallel with machines, making her performance a poetic meditation on La Prairie’s pioneering strides in the beauty industry, and the pleasant overlap of art and science, nature and artifice. 

“The inspiration behind the work very much relates to intrinsic notions of La Prairie—Swiss nature, art, and science,” she says. “It was about incorporating all those elements into the theme of The Dance of Light and Water. For me, this was very interesting as light has always been an essential part of my work in theaters and water is a representation of the human body.” She staged her performance, called Moving Towards the Horizons, on the Miami Beach oceanfront in a space of her own design with a water-inspired soundtrack that evoked much-needed feelings of serenity during the hectic Miami Art Week. 

La Prairie’s patronage of Wen-Chi Su is the latest example of the brand’s ongoing partnership with Art Basel Miami Beach—and continued engagement with female creative talents such as Carla Chan, who will join forces with the brand on an activation at Frieze New York in May. (More partnerships with female artists are on the horizon in the fall.) This past year, the brand celebrated visionary artist Niki de Saint Phalle by sponsoring a sweeping retrospective of the late French-American talent at MoMA PS1 in New York. Throughout her career, De Saint Phalle gravitated toward a specific shade of cobalt blue—a color she said embodied “joy and luck”—and often hosted lively creative exchanges in her Manhattan studio, which neighbored La Prairie’s atelier. It quickly caught the brand’s eye and became the signature color of its famed Skin Caviar collection, thus kicking off the brand’s artistic origin story. 

In a hyper-saturated industry like skincare, it’s rare for an intricate concept to be executed so thoroughly through every aspect of a launch. From the formula, to its effect on skin, to the design of the packaging and even the monumental artistic statement during the launch event at Art Basel Miami Beach, La Prairie has infused the unmistakable clarity and brilliance of the morning sunlight dancing off Lake Geneva’s surface into every bit of White Caviar Essence Extraordinaire. The true testament of their inspiration at work, however, is how the collection makes skin radiate light.