One cream, unchanged since 1974
A single formulation, made in the same house, in quantities decided by the harvest rather than by demand.
The house, in figures
Not reformulated, not extended, not lightened
The formula has not been reformulated, extended into a range, or given a lighter version for summer. That is not conservatism for its own sake — it is that the ingredient list depends on a harvest we do not control, and a house that adds three products a year eventually has to buy what is available rather than what it wants. Production is set each spring against what the growers can supply, and when a year is finished it is finished.
La Crème
The only thing the house makes. A rich, slow-absorbing cream built on cold-pressed oils from nine contracted growers, emulsified without silicones and stabilised without parabens — which is why it has a twelve-month life once opened rather than a three-year one. It is not a light cream and there is no light version. Applied to damp skin, a quantity the size of a pea covers a face.
- Sizes
- 30 ml, 50 ml, 50 ml refill
- Base
- Cold-pressed apricot kernel and camellia
- Emulsifier
- Cetearyl olivate, no silicones
- Preservation
- Benzyl alcohol and dehydroacetic acid
- Open life
- Twelve months from the stamped fill date
- Made
- Compounded in Grasse, filled in Mumbai
The house
Altamount Road, and the rooms the year is finished in.
What long customers write
I have bought this cream for twenty-seven years and it has smelled slightly different in perhaps six of them, always with a card explaining the harvest. No other house I buy from would tell me that, because no other house would admit the thing had changed at all.
This year is nearly finished
When it is, there is a waiting list rather than a substitute. The concierge line will tell you honestly where the list stands before you commit to anything.
When the year opens
Production is set against the harvest each spring and the year sells out at some point after it. Ask us where in that cycle we are — the answer changes twice a year and only twice.
The journal
Photographed here, mostly of rooms and cloth rather than of product.