Edelweiss is the flower everyone in the Alps knows and almost nobody picks. It’s protected across much of the range, and it grows slowly, in small numbers, on high limestone ledges. Harvesting it from the wild for skincare would be against the law in most of the Alps, and we wouldn’t do it anyway.

So the edelweiss in our Edelweiss Hydrating Serum never grew on a mountain. It comes from a plant-cell culture: a few cells taken once from a cultivated plant, then grown in a sterile nutrient medium at a lab in Switzerland. The cells are harvested and gently extracted, and the INCI name says exactly that: Leontopodium Alpinum Callus Culture Extract.

We use it at 0.5%, alongside three weights of hyaluronic acid at 1.5% in total. The edelweiss cells bring antioxidant compounds to the formula, while the hyaluronic acid does the work of holding water.

The honest part: edelweiss is the symbol of our mountains, yet it’s the one mountain flower on our list that doesn’t come from our valley. It travels about 240 km from the lab that grows it. We think that’s a fair trade for leaving the wild flowers where they are.