the beauty market, so this is where we’ve found ourselves fitting in. It’s a range where you can use everything. How did you come to start working with Selma Blair? This is the wildest story! We’re a little Australian skincare business shuffling along, and we get a call from Selma’s management team saying Selma uses your skincare and would you like to meet her to explore opportunities to collaborate. I couldn’t believe it, so we went through the back end of our site and saw that she’d been buying for a year and we didn’t realise. When Selma’s management encouraged her to partner with a skincare brand she responded that she’d only do it with ESK because it’s the only one she can use; since she has autoimmune disease her skin is extremely sensitive. So, they reached out! We met her in New York over coffee, clicked and started working on a product together. We finally decided we were happy with it, and now we’re launching it. It’s a pinch-me moment. Plus, she’s now one of my closest girlfriends. The result of our collaboration is Ultimate A Gold, a game-changing night cream with hero ingredient retinal and the most effective and gentle ingredients evidence based cosmeceutical skincare has to offer. Tackling the signs of ageing skin including fine lines, skin elasticity, impaired barrier function, hydration, dullness and uneven skin tone, it’s our most powerful product yet and yet it’s still ridiculously well tolerated. With Ultimate A Gold, we’re doing it all in a single product making it cost effective – if I could recommend only one, this would be it. What are Selma’s favourite products? Selma was reacting to everything and had been to every A-list dermatologist in Beverly Hills, everything kept making it worse to a point where her face was bleeding. She ended up going to a new Australian aesthetician who told her she couldn’t use anything readily available in the U.S. and gave her one of her own Australian products from her handbag – it was an ESK cleanser. She eventually built up to also using the barrier repair cream, the Gentle Glow at night and the Ultimate A, which was the precursor to Ultimate A Gold. It was these products she wanted to combine into a single one. What do we need to understand about our skin in order to start to plan how to treat it? Skin is slightly acidic because of the colony of friendly bacteria that create a protective acid mantle, which is integral. We now know that soaps will destroy that and disrupt the function due to its exceptionally high pH, so cleanser should be around pH 4.5 to maintain the mantle. We’re passionate about this. We don’t want to put your bacteria on the backfoot so we work with it, not against it. People don’t realise you don’t need to double cleanse and add in a toner, unless you wear a lot of heavy makeup. Our aim is to get your skin so good, you don’t need to wear any! I tell people to use less skin care not more. I can’t stand multiple step expensive routines, you don’t need it. 76
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