When it’s minus 10 degrees outside and the air inside is as dry as a space station airlock you have to bring out the big skincare guns. I wouldn’t waste an expensive gem like Biologique Recherche Creme Masque Vernix, $210, (biologique-recherche.com for stockists) on my face when it’s warm out, but come endless January, you do what you gotta do.
The name is something of a metaphor. Masque Vernix is meant to mimic the vernix caseosa, the waxy protective layer coating the skin of newborns. This mask takes your winter-beaten, sad, ashy face and replaces it with the glowy untroubled visage of someone who just returned from a month at a beach shack in Trancoso.
The ingredients are a greatest hits package of nurturing elements like ceramides (the fatty ‘grout’ between the tiles that are your skin cells) cholesterol (bad for the blood vessels, excellent for your skin) and ‘amniotic fluid’, an extract that replicates the protein and lipid-rich amniotic fluid bathing fetuses in the womb, because they need cosseting and protecting and so do we.
Skip this if you are squeamish: A colleague once whispered to me that her former surgical nurse-slash-crazy aunt, now in her 80s, claimed that back in the day she and her fellow nurses would save the vernix from c-section newborns to use as skin cream. I am pretty certain this is wildly unethical and breaks any number of rules and probably not even true, so you did’t it from me.