When she’s not busy lifting and toning the jawlines of Amber Valletta and Naomi Campbell, Danuta Mieloch, the facialist and founder of the popular Rescue Spas in New York and Philadelphia, can be found in her lab, a soaring, 3,000-square-foot studio at her Bucks County, Pennsylvania, farmhouse. After more than 15 years as an in-demand aesthetician, Mieloch is endlessly tinkering with her first product: a standalone, milky-smooth cream of her own design. “I’m obsessed with finding that all-in-one potion that does it all,” she reveals.
She’s not the only one. Following inevitable fatigue from multistep skin-care routines popularized by Korean beauty imports and viral tutorials on YouTube and Instagram Stories, there is a new demand for streamlined, do-it-all moisturizers. At her spa’s boutique, Mieloch is consistently re-upping her supply of Biologique Recherche Creme MSRH, a velvety salve with yam and soy extracts to balance dry, hormonal skin (“I can’t wean women off it”), and The Face Cream from Dr. Barbara Sturm. The replenishing fix from the Düsseldorf-based physician—which has become so popular since it launched in 2011 that Sephora just picked it up for full distribution—is the next best thing to her MC1 “Blood” Cream, the bespoke collagen-stimulating salve Sturm makes for patients, spiked with their own stem cells. (Cher was patient zero.) And don’t get Mieloch started on Augustinus Bader. The German biomedical professor’s debut product, simply called The Cream, launched last year with the same, hyper-reparative amino acids used in his medical-grade burn gel. Backed by Melanie Griffith and fronted by Diane Kruger, the intensely hydrating yet light-as-silk cream is on track to exceed sales of $20 million this year, a figure that continues to grow despite its hefty price tag (a 50-milliliter bottle retails for $265). Bader’s The Body Cream for all-over toning, hydrating and firming recently debuted to similar fanfare.
The frenzy is reminiscent of another era that dominated the 20th century: “that of the cult cream,” says Sue Y. Nabi, a L’Oréal alum and the former president of Lâncome, who struck out on her own with Orveda—a clean, unisex skincare brand—in 2017. Combining science with a great backstory, explains Nabi, was the modus operandi of the original beauty behemoths selling hope in a jar: from Elizabeth Arden’s Eight Hour Cream, which rose to prominence in the 1930s as a skin protectant and moisturizer (Arden reportedly used it as a remedy for her bruised thoroughbred horses), to aerospace physicist Max Huber’s Miracle Broth, which debuted in the 1960s when the fermented seaweed concoction effectively cured the burns he suffered in a laboratory explosion. As the main ingredient in Crème de la Mer, which Huber sold to Estee Lauder in 1995, it set off a chain reaction of launches with what Lauder’s executive group president John Dempsey describes as “a once upon a time” origin story—from the Nobel Prize–winning, skin-rejuvenating molecule behind Dr. Gregory Bays Brown’s RéVive to the protein-packed delicacy that inspired La Prairie’s cultish Caviar Luxe Cream.
But for a new generation of skincare enthusiasts raised on clean ingredients, transparent practices, and the often over-hyped promises of social media, today’s formulas have to be a bit “more proven, and less magical,” says Nabi. “I think everyone wants to invest in fairly simple routines now,” says Dallas-based facialist Joanna Czech of why we’re re-approaching peak cream-obsession. “They don’t want 17 serums or oils, which to be honest, are not necessary.” Czech has little trouble moving jars of the German brand Medical Beauty Research (MBR)’s Cream Extraordinary, a $372 emulsion that plumps and illuminates with gold leaf extract, or the mineral-rich Chuda Healing Hydrating Cream at a somewhat more modest price of $150. There’s this movement toward really focusing on keeping extra products to a minimum,” says Larissa Jensen, a beauty-industry analyst for the market-research firm NPD Group, which saw a 5% spike in moisturizing creams last year while sales of moisturizing face oils, that onetime millennial skin-care favorite, dropped by 4%.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the skincare brain trust in Seoul is already ahead of this shift. AHC, a Korean-based company, has just launched its Essential Real Eye Cream for Face in the U.S. One tube of the multitasker, a lighter version of the line’s hugely popular eye cream that fans were using off-label on their cheeks for an extra lift, reportedly sells every three seconds in Korea—a statistic that should inspire Mieloch to work a little faster.
