An eye cream built around oblepikha — sea buckthorn — the orange berry that grows wild across Siberia and the Altai and that gives Natura Siberica's best-known range its name and its colour.
Why sea buckthorn
Sea buckthorn is one of the more genuinely remarkable plants in cosmetics. The berry contains a great deal of vitamin C — by weight, several times that of an orange — along with carotenoids, vitamin E and an unusual fatty-acid profile, including palmitoleic acid, which is one of the few plant sources of a fat that occurs naturally in human skin. The oil is deep orange, and that colour is the carotenoids.
What an eye cream can and cannot do
Worth being straight about, because eye creams attract more claims than almost any other product.
The skin around the eye is markedly thinner than on the rest of the face, has fewer oil glands, and moves constantly. It dries out faster and shows dehydration sooner — which is why a well-formulated eye cream makes a visible difference within minutes: hydrated skin is plumper, and plumper skin creases less.
What it will not do is change the structure of the area. Dark circles caused by pigmentation or by the shadow of a deep tear trough are anatomy, not dryness, and no cream reaches them. If your under-eye area looks better after eight hours' sleep and less salt, that is what it was responding to.
How to apply it
Less than you think, and further out than you think. A grain of rice for both eyes. Use the ring finger — it is the weakest, so it presses least — and tap rather than rub or drag. Apply along the orbital bone, the ridge you can feel under the eye, not close to the lash line: warmth and blinking migrate the product inwards on their own, and applying too close is what makes eyes sting and puff.
Let it settle for a minute before make-up.
Note
For external use only. Avoid direct contact with the eye; rinse with water if it gets in. Patch test on the inner forearm first if your skin is reactive.