Rice Biome Radiance Essence

How to apply

1. After cleansing, while your skin is still damp, tip a little into your palm.
2. Press it into damp skin, face first and then down the neck. Pressing works better than rubbing here.
3. It goes on milky and settles smooth, with nothing left on your fingers.
4. Follow with the cream while your skin is still damp.

💡Our tips

• Press rather than rub.
• The bottle pours slowly on purpose, so there is no rush and you can always add more.
• On a dry day, a second layer straight after the first does more than a heavier cream will.
• Take it down the neck. The skin there is thinner, and it is the first place most people skip.

68% rice bran water

Two thirds of the formula, in place of the water that usually fills that space. Bran is the outer layer milled off brown rice on its way to white. The water drawn from it carries vitamins B1, A and E, and minerals.

2% niacinamide

The ingredient doing the work on texture and tone. Even texture is where radiance comes from: light reflects evenly off a smooth surface and scatters off a rough one.

Rice and fermentation

Four ingredients from rice and fermentation run through every formula we make: a sanghwang mushroom ferment, a Lactobacillus postbiotic, rice bran water and rice bran extract.

The parts milling throws away

The germ holds two-thirds of the nutrition in a grain of rice, and the bran, where our extract comes from, almost another third. White rice is what is left over, about five per cent.

From Gochang in Korea

The whole county of Gochang is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and that is where our rice ferment comes from. Sanghwang mushroom grown on brown rice sprouted in mineral water, then fermented and filtered through cloth. We use twice as much of it as the supplier asks for.

What the bacteria leave behind

Lactobacillus does the fermenting and is then removed; a lysate is what stays, and unlike a live culture it keeps. Skin carries bacteria of its own, and this is here with that in mind.

Older than any ingredient list

Migamsu, the water left from washing rice, has been used on the face in Korea for centuries. Ours is drawn from the bran itself, and it carries vitamins B1, A and E.

Made from the oil, not borrowed

Ceramides make up somewhere between 40 and 65 per cent of the lipids in the outermost layer of skin. Ours is built from rice bran oil rather than taken from an animal source, and it brings the mix of fatty acids the oil came with, which holds the surface together more tightly than a single one would.

Noticed in a sake brewery

Galactomyces is the yeast that brews sake. In the mid-1970s Japanese researchers noticed something about elderly brewers: their hands had stayed smoother than their faces. It is here for the balance of oil and water in skin.

The one that changes on contact

Panthenol is provitamin B5. It converts to pantothenic acid once it is on the skin, which is the form the body actually uses. It draws water in and slows how fast it leaves.

Named after a willow

Salicylic acid takes its name from Salix, the willow, where it was first identified in the nineteenth century. Attach an eight-carbon chain to it and you get LHA, the version in this formula: more oil-soluble, and gentler on skin.