The Times Magazine: Victoria Beckham’s favourite skin cream

The Times Magazine: Victoria Beckham’s favourite skin cream

09 March 2020

"How did a 60-year-old academic from Leipzig become the fashionistas’ new crush? They swear he can make them look younger, of course"

How did a 60-year-old academic from Leipzig become the fashionistas’ new crush? They swear he can make them look younger, of course. Harriet Walker meets Augustinus Bader, the professor behind a bottle of £200 skin cream.

Victoria Beckham thinks it’s “AMAZING” and Vanity Fair described it as a “real-life time machine” – meet the wrinkle cream for which the A-list are prepared to pay £8 a squirt. Net-A-Porter can barely keep it in stock and the product itself has racked up sales of more than £4.7 million in only two years.

Margot Robbie uses Augustinus Bader, as does Carla Bruni. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Naomi Campbell and Yasmin le Bon are all fans. Beckham was so obsessed, she enlisted its creator to come up with a moisturiser for her own range. 

I meet Professor Bader, director of applied stem cell biology and cell technology at the University of Leipzig, at the 0.01 per cent Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge, London, a few days after he sat front row at Beckham’s fashion week show last month.

What do the 60-year-old German academic’s colleagues make of his new celebrity friends?

“I haven’t told them,” he says nervously. “I said I was going on holiday.”

But they and his students must know about the runaway success of his £205-a-pop face cream? "Most still do not realise," he demurs. "The university is like a village. This is a different planet."

On this planet the cult cream reigns supreme, with skincare brands able to charge what they like to a wealthy snake oil demographic that is desperate to turn back the clock.

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The moment of incontrovertible truth for me came not with the erasing of the ladder of creases in my forehead - although I convince myself I can see a tiny difference after ten days' use of Bader's cream - but when I rubbed a dollop (maybe £20 worth) on a particularly stubborn, red-raw patch of eczema that had been troubling me for months. It was gone the next morning. 

"Inflammation is a positive sign, because it activates yor stem cells to go into the repair process," Bader explains. "What the cream does is repair the mcro-environment around the inflammation so the stem cells can get to work." 

Read the full article at TheTimes.co.uk