The most expensive, exclusive cosmetics

By Vanessa Gisquet

updated 8:19 p.m. ET April 21, 2005

Men, if you don't want your wives to spend a small fortune on beauty products, make sure they don't read the rest of this article.

That's because after searching the shelves of high-end boutiques and department stores, hunting across the Internet and speaking with the top luxury spas, we found the world's most expensive — and exclusive — age-defying facial products.

How expensive? The average price of the top ten products on our list is $402 per ounce. That is over 7,500 percent more than the price of anti-aging facial products sold at most drug and grocery stores, like Olay Age-Defying Daily Renewal Cream, which typically sells for around $5 per ounce. (More expensive than caviar, but less than gold or cocaine.)

From clothes to cosmetic surgery, given the whopping amounts of money that people are willing to spend fighting the effects of aging, it should come as no surprise that haute couture skincare isn't cheap. What should be surprising, however, is the fact that the claims many of these products make about reducing wrinkles and eliminating blotches are supported by very few unbiased studies.

In the cosmetic industry, the term “clinically proven” is often more marketing than science. Typically, the phrase means that at least one component of the cosmetic product has been shown, in one study or another, to have had some biological action, such as helping wounds heal faster by stimulating cell division. That the product has been demonstrated by a well-controlled, independent clinical study to have significant effects in skin, however, is not necessarily true.

Yet, as the baby boomer generation's youth fades, the revenue generated by anti-aging treatments is on the rise. According to the marketing information company NPD Group, sales of prestige skincare products in U.S. department stores alone reached $2.1 billion in 2004, up 17 percent from 2000.

So what makes these products so expensive? For one thing, many of them are made from expensive ingredients such as crushed pearls, caviar and exotic antioxidants extracted from rare plants like the Chilean evergreen tree. Other popular components are anti-oxidants like grape seed extract, alpha lipoic acid, chamomile oils and green tea — protectants that are said to reduce skin damage from free radicals. Among the most important ingredients are customized cell messenger proteins such as peptides and epidermal growth factor that stimulate cell growth.

The use of many of these skincare products can be traced back to a pioneering study that appeared in July 1989 in the New England Journal Of Medicine. This study showed that topical application of an epidermal growth factor accelerates the rate of healing of second-degree burns and partial-thickness skin wounds. Based on his findings, the study's first-author Dr. Gregory Brown, who is also a plastic surgeon, founded, RéVive, a skincare company in Louisville, Ky. The company's most expensive product, the Intensité Volumizing Serum, goes for $600 per ounce and uses a bioengineered molecule called keratinocyte growth factor that he says turns over dying skin cells eight times faster than normal skin can.

Brown justifies the expense by saying that the reason his products cost so much is because they use growth factors obtained from recombinant-DNA technology, which creates exact — albeit synthetic — replicas of the respective molecules in the human bodies. Adding to his expenditure are years of research and “enormous” production costs. “As you know,” he says, “for any pharmaceutical molecule from bench to commercial production, on average, is a minimum of $100 million.”

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