Hero Product: Anti-Age Night Serum
The Journey of the Apricot
by Elize Manoukian
My favorite part of the day is night, when I can crawl into bed unbothered by the world and with a face full of products working their magic. Night time is when your skin undergoes its most crucial regeneration, so what you put on your skin is essentially what your skin breathes in while you sleep.
After double cleansing and toning, skin of all ages and textures will flourish with the nourishing Night Serum formula, of which Apricot Kernel Oil is the MVP. The serum spreads like butter but doesn’t ever feel heavy--which is wonderful, because the apricot scent is so heavenly that you will want to put it everywhere.
Besides apricot kernel, the night serum also features a blend of rosehip, and sea buckthorn. All of the oils are 100% organic, and cold-pressed in the Nairian laboratory to render the highest quality. Apricot kernel oil contains a beneficial combination of essential fatty acids, which tone, brighten, and firm, as well as Vitamins A and E, which block each cell’s aging process. Rosehip seed and sea buckthorn oil contain high levels of carotenoids to enhance skin regeneration, making it a perfectly balanced evening treatment. Fear not retinoid users--the product has a soothing and calming effect on singed skin, and due to its chemical composition, doesn’t hinder the Vitamin A.
The serum’s balm-like feel comes from the carriers of beeswax and coconut oil. Coconut oil contains ferulic acid, an extremely effective antioxidant that has been shown to be more powerful than Vitamin E in preventing skin aging, age spots, and light damage. Beeswax, from bees tended to on the Nairian farm, gently seals the formula into the skin, allowing the other ingredients penetrate more deeply into the skin all night long. The formula acts like a face mask, except you can leave it on all night and there’s no silicon waste piling up around you. In fact, the product isn’t watered down with any preservatives or emulgamators (not even water), so everything in the formula is truly an active ingredient.
But the real star here is the apricot: the effortful, yet unknowable summer fruit. You might remember the scene in Call Me By Your Name (2017) where Professor Perlman and Oliver debate the etymology of the word “apricot”. Armie Hammer’s character goes off about how the Greek and Arabic words for the fruit takes from the Latin praecoquum, from “pre-coquere, precook, to ripen early, as in precocious.” But a fruit by any other name should still taste as sweet. The apricot’s scientific name is prunus armeniaca, a nod to the history of cultivation in the region, and the Armenian merchants who first introduced the fruit to ancient Rome. Archaeological excavation of Garni, a pagan temple built by Armenian kings around 77 AD, discovered apricot seeds from the Copper Age, dating them at about 6,000 years old.
Despite all of civilization’s best attempts to intervene in the apricot’s journey, there’s just something about Armenia that is receptive to the fruit’s modalities, and where you can find it in its most natural state. Apricots everywhere else just taste and smell like the idea of the apricot. Pull apart the sun soaked halves of an Armenian-grown apricot, as sweet and fragrant as a spoonful of honey, and the fruit will never taste the same.
Perhaps it’s Armenia’s 300 annual days of sunshine and mineral-rich, volcanic soil that created the right climate and conditions for its evolution. We’ll never know, we can only reap the benefits.
* * *
Elize Manoukian is a writer and DIY facial aficionado who currently lives in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. She believes that a small brand is like a family. And for her, Nairian represents the tightly-knit diasporan community that raised her in California. Because she is so close to the action, Elize often visits the Nairian eco-farm, where she takes part in rose harvests, interviews lab and agricultural workers, and unlocks the secrets of Nairian's production. Her favorite product is the Lavender Deodorant.