Martha Stewart has been struck by lightning three times. No joke. I’d up that to 9 or 10, or possibly 300, if you count her businesses, thirst traps, and endeavors with Snoop Dogg. Her latest spark of electricity is a skin-care line she created with Dr. Dhaval Bhanusali, the dermatologist who helped formulate Hailey Bieber’s insanely popular Rhode products and the category-defining gel moisturizer, Neutrogena Hydro Boost.
This may strike the cynical as yet another celebrity hopping on beauty’s gravy train. But Martha Stewart doesn’t hop on trains, nor does Dr. Bhanusali. “I’ve cared so much about my skin from an early age,” she tells me. “My mom taught me everything. She used baby oil to clean her face and a hot cloth, and then she applied her trusted Pond’s moisturizer, and that was it. But she had very beautiful, unlined skin until she was 90.”
Stewart, at 84, is a glowing example of what good genes and diligence can do for your complexion. She remembers getting one sunburn (“And that was that”) and now starts every morning with a coating of Alastin S.P.F. 34 tinted moisturizer. “I look better than anybody else in the room, by the way,” she says without a hint of modesty. “It’s just a fact.”
If we’ve learned anything from Stewart over the past decades, it’s that hard work brings results. The cakes, the rose gardens, the table settings, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover, the face. “It’s all about work,” she says. “It’s not magic. All this takes work. I won’t leave my house without my green juice in the morning. I want to set a good example.”
Stewart and Dr. Bhanusali met in Miami and started collaborating on a skin-care line centered around CBD. “We got pretty far along with that, but the bottom fell out of the whole CBD business,” she says. Back to the drawing board they went!
Dr. Bhanusali was interested in vitamin C but had concerns that most C serums are unreliable. “When you open the bottle, more or less it’s degrading in real time,” he says. “You might get a couple of minutes out of it, or, if you’re really lucky, you might get an hour or so of active use. The vast majority of formulas don’t work.” Who wants that? Not Martha. Not me.
He formulated a more stable antioxidant that also happens to be calming, with hydrating ingredients including squalene, hyaluronic acid, and vitamin E. “It was truly like a recipe Martha would put together,” he says. Stewart chimes in: “My whole business is founded on recipes.” (I highly recommend her Best Chocolate Cake.) “There’s an answer to every problem. There’s a recipe, and when you put the right ingredients together, you have something spectacular.”
The result is Elm Biosciences, the serum, along with a night cream and supplements. Stewart was adamant about the latter, but “it was a hard sell,” she says, because Dr. Bhanusali thinks most of them “are just marketing.” He consulted with other scientists and now believes in the benefits of this particular blend. Martha takes the Elm supplements daily.
The newest addition is the A30 Elemental Night Cream, a retinoid with lipids to minimize irritation. I’ve been applying it as if my life depended on it.
The world does not need another skin-care line, as Stewart well knows. “There are too many products,” she says. “I’ve tried every single skin-care line known to mankind, including the Koreans, the Japanese, and the French. Really and truly, I want to make a simple recipe for skin care that works on almost everybody.”
I ran into her in the dining room of the Mark Hotel a few weeks ago, and her skin was a compelling argument to follow her lead. What does this mean for the future of thirst traps? “Maybe I can continue my thirst traps for another 20 years.”
Linda Wells is the Editor of AIR MAIL LOOK