Buy the Sea

Barefoot and blond, Goldie Hawn sat curled up on her floral-patterned sofa in her Malibu beach house. Barbara Walters was grilling Hawn (tenderly, like calamari) for one of her pre-Oscar telecasts. Hawn was at the top of her game then, as not only a hot film actress but also a successful director and producer in the big payday boys club that is Hollywood. As Walters rattled off her recent accomplishments, Hawn’s eyes misted and her voice wobbled. “Whenever I feel like I’m getting a swelled head,” she told Walters, “I always think about my father.” If I felt that I was a real hot shot, he would always tell me to go out to the beach, she said. “Look at the sea to be reminded of your place in the scheme of things.”

Like many people, I’m drawn to the sea. Yes, its vastness is humbling, but that’s not the only reason it pulls me in. Lakes are fine, but, for me, they lack the mystery and danger that come with tides and undertows, not to mention mammoth underwater creatures like whales and sharks. And the taste of salty air could happily replace my craving for Miss Vickie’s potato chips. I’ll never forget my visit to the Dead Sea, where it felt like I could walk from one end to other without fear of being bitten by a toothy fish. After 20 minutes, I gave up that notion to just float, like Ophelia, under the scorching Middle Eastern sun. Between the intense heat, the water’s sedative effect and no risk of sinking in the dense water, I felt like I could drift into a long nap. But, after a while, the salt crystals began biting my skin, so I headed to shore where I slathered myself in sea mud and baked in the sun along with the other tourists.

Although seawater today is three times saltier than human blood, we still look to the oceans as founts of health and beauty, probably because of our evolutionary legacy as tadpoles. Myriad skin-care companies, such as La Prairie, Euoko, Thalgo, Elemis, Phytomer, Perricone MD, Valmont and La Mer, employ marine ingredients such as white, red and blue algae, corals, sea mud, sea salts, caviar, salmon DNA and marine plant stem cells, promising to keep us looking young-ish. Research data indicate that many sea-based ingredients have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidation effects. They provide skin softening and mild anti-aging benefits, so the beauty claims are not just a case of marketers run amok.

But there’s “good skin” and then there’s “good skin karma.” With the global increase in demand for sea-based skin-care products, industrial-scale harvesting is harming delicate marine-based ecosystems. One company that is addressing the problem of sustainability is Estée Lauder’s La Mer brand, which only uses hand-harvested algae from the coast of Brittany. Crème de la Mer has been the gold standard in fancy-schmancy skin care since the brand launched in 1965. It is based on something the company calls its “miracle broth,” which is a sea-kelp ferment. Though the process of fermentation is as old as the mead with which our ancestors got loaded, it remains a potent transformer of matter. When scientist Max Huber created his cream (the company was later bought by Estée Lauder), he attempted to mimic sea conditions in his garage laboratory. That meant employing such effects as intermittent flashing lights (representing bits of sunlight penetrating the water), animal sounds (whale music, basically) and rocking movements (waves) during the fermentation process. At the end of four months, he had his “miracle broth,” which he mixed in an emollient base with distillation of lime to help mask the unpleasant fermented-seaweed aroma. He used this unguent to heal his skin from terrible burns he had suffered in a laboratory accident and, legend has it, he was so impressed by its restorative effects that he ate a spoonful of the thick balm daily. La Mer is still made in small batches today in a laboratory in Melville, N.Y., and that explains why jars must be pre-ordered or your name put on a waiting list. It is my favourite cream through the tough winter months, and I never take any long-distance flights without a tiny jar in my handbag.

And now it’s time for an end-of-summer seaside jaunt. I’m off to Ile de Ré, Brittany (not too far from where La Mer harvests its seaweed, in fact). And, oh, yes, Johnny Depp has a little villa there too. Hmm...my skin feels brighter already!