Recently, I went to Japan to witness a flower bloom. This kind of thing happens often enough that it’s not usually necessary to cross the international date line for the opportunity. But few flowers are considered cultural treasures, and fewer have such specific Japanese ancestry. Only this one has a job, having been recently employed by the Shiseido Corporation. It simply had to be seen to be believed.
It required a trip to Yamagata, a prefecture just a little ways up the archipelago from Tokyo. “It’s just a little bit inaka,” a publicist said, using the Japanese word for “podunk.” Yamagata is known primarily for its superlative agricultural products, including white rice; it’s also the site of a lab run by Keio University’s Institute for Advanced Biosciences, where flower petals are evaluated for their ability to confer measurable skin luminosity. The beauty company recently signed an agreement on product innovations with these top researchers and developers.
Shiseido is more than a Japanese beauty company; it is the Japanese beauty company. The name comes from a line in the Confucian Book of Changes that translates loosely to “How wonderful is the virtue of the earth, from which all things are born!”
Founded 150 years ago, Shiseido pre-dates L’Oréal and Coty and is about two Estée Lauders old. Arinobu Fukuhara, a 24-year-old navy pharmacist, opened a shop in Tokyo’s tony Ginza neighborhood styled after the nascent pharmacies in the Western world. It sold toothpaste and skin formulas, including a red lotion called Eudermine. It would install a soda fountain at the turn of the century; a century and a half after its founding, it would acquire Dr. Dennis Gross Skincare (and its Alpha Beta peel pads) for a reported $450 million.
The Platonic ideal of a Shiseido product combines scientific ingenuity with Japanese cultural traditions. We, a small international delegation of beauty editors, were gathered there in Yamagata to bear witness to this perfect union. It was as if the company had written its secrets on the fine and spindly petals of safflowers; like a message could be received, if we looked hard enough.
Bloom Town
From Tokyo Haneda to Shonai Airport, urbanity recedes through an airplane window. Our first stop was the Shonai Hotel Suiden Terrasse, designed by Shigeru Ban and floating on a rice paddy; the wood-and-glass structure bends and refracts the surrounding landscape, and every wall frames a view of some wide, green expanse. Shonai was maybe 10 degrees cooler than Tokyo, and it was still hot and also raining softly, the air itself seeming sweaty.
We were offered umbrellas for the 15-second walk to and from a 60-second bus ride to Tsuruoka Science Park, a squat campus of buildings in front of Suiden Terrasse. Inside the park, we passed labs that housed 30 or 40 or 55 chimney-shaped machines that, we were told, each cost about $700,000 and can analyze a substance down to its biological components. The campus has produced a saliva-based cancer test, as well as a campaign to prove that Yamagata’s Tsuyahime rice has the most umami flavor of all of the rice grown throughout Japan.
In a neighboring facility, groups of engineers used these elements to envision new raw materials. The day we toured the facility, one team was in Milan showcasing a new biodegradable fiber made from splicing spider silk.
It is here that scientists from Shiseido, in partnership with Keio University, have searched for answers to cutaneous questions in the fine petals of safflowers. The company has known that the flower, indigenous to the Middle East but grown in Japan for centuries, can cause the skin to bloom, but until recently it has not been sure how. In 2019, Shiseido presented research demonstrating a link between capillaries and skin elasticity, earning a research award from the International Federation of Societies of Cosmetic Chemists. A new patented compound, called SafflowerRED, has been shown to positively interact with those vascular and neural networks beneath skin.
“We’re no longer trying to address individual issues using individual ingredients,” explained Yuko Ameno, a senior product-development manager at Shiseido. “We’re not just looking at the skin, but underneath it.” Extract from the flower can increase blood flow in the skin, but until recently no one knew exactly how.
The Platonic ideal of a Shiseido product combines scientific ingenuity with Japanese cultural traditions.
Shiseido has used safflowers in its formulas for three decades, though the flowers have been employed in food, medicine, and dye for much longer. The Mogami safflower, grown in the relatively temperate climes of Yamagata, contains a buildable pigment that, applied densely, becomes an exquisite crimson. (The Japanese word for “safflower” is “benihana,” which is pronounced “benibana” and composed of the Chinese characters for “red” and “flower.”) Around the 18th century, at the height of the trade, dye was shipped down to Kyoto, where it shaded silks and makeup; beni was the most popular rouge of the Edo period. Their manifold uses, as well as their association with Japan’s cultural history, have made safflowers the national treasure of Yamagata.
How fortuitous, then, that after extensive metabolome testing, it was revealed to have capabilities in topical skin care The official claims for Vital Perfection’s Advanced Cream are “firmer, brighter, more lifted.”
Right before a delicious Japanese-Italian buffet, we were treated to a fun game (for most of the assembled press except for me, who was mortified by the end of it): each person would submit their face to a fantastic vanity mirror of Shiseido’s technology, which scored the quality of their skin with a value between 100 (perfect!) and 1 (corpse). Who wanted to go first?
Most mirrors are nonjudgmental, but Shiseido’s Skin Visualizer is a critic by design, measuring skin’s “beauty circulation” based on qualities of “radiance, resilience, and suppleness.” The group passively allowed a Japanese editor to go first, in the hopes her score might establish a curve. An image of her face was mapped onto a triangular diagram before us, and the number 70 appeared. Brazil got 63, Canada got 64. But the highest score of all went to an American—a travel writer and my compatriot. “Numbers don’t lie,” she said. (My own figure was in the 40s.)
After sunset on Suiden Terrace, the dining room of the most gorgeous hotel that has ever been built in harmony with a rice paddy was walled with night. To my right, Shiseido officials discussed the top-secret spokesperson that the company would announce a few months later. It looked like it actually pained press mother Jen to deny me. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t!”
“Are we talking A-list?,” I asked.
”A-plus-plus-plus-list,” Jen insisted. My first thought was Meghan Markle—it ended up being Anne Hathaway. When the company held an event to make the announcement, in September, the dress code requested a “touch of gold.” But Hathaway appeared to have been submerged in it for 24 hours prior; she glowed from toe to dress to cheek. Shiseido execs had expected her to make a few remarks; instead, she oozed gratitude for close to a half-hour. “It was amazing to realize that a company so timeless, so synonymous with excellence and care and thoughtfulness could want me,” the actress told People.
One thing about Japan: it is hard, possibly impossible, to not be grateful to be alive in a place such as this; to not look out the window of any airplane, bus, or luxury accommodation and be moved to tears by natural splendor.
Here, rice fields genuflected before stern and distant mountains; there, velvet rugs of moss pooled on forest floors beneath the drone of cicadas—the singular sound of Japanese summer. The buses we rode in must have looked like office buildings on wheels, accelerating carefully on Yamagata’s hill-born roads, filled with preening professionals.
We slept at Yamagata the Takinami, in the Akayu, an onsen town known for its hot springs and public baths, not far from a former samurai stronghold. Takinami was refashioned from a 400-year-old building and retains elements of the Uesugi clan’s architecture; Noguchi lamps glowed egg-like along dark corridors surrounding a dining theater where we ate a set breakfast of kaiseki small plates.
The most important stop on our trip sprawled over a few acres of wrinkled hillside in Shirataka, Yamagata. We arrived on the morning of the most beautiful midsummer bloom. There’s a Buddhist word for it, explained Masaaki Konno, certified safflower master, who gathered us on plastic chairs beneath a tarp for the presentation—I forgot to write it down, but it means “beautiful midsummer bloom.” At night, rain softens the safflowers’ thorns, and they’re picked in the morning still wet with dew.
As the sun climbed overhead, the topic of climate change was gently raised. Has it gotten harder over time to grow these treasures, I asked one of the safflower farmers? “There’s no year that has gone as well as I’d wanted,” he answered, diplomatically. Growing treasure, he says, can be motivating. He believes in gentle approaches and step-by-step problem-solving, but most of all, he believes in soil and rain. When somebody asks if he’s tried the new Shiseido products, he is unembarrassed to admit that he has. And they’ve done wonders for his fine lines.
Brennan Kilbane is a New York–based writer. He is originally from Cleveland, and his interviews and essays have appeared in GQ, New York magazine, and Allure, where he was recently on staff as a features writer
