BY LAURA REGENSDORF<\/b><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Africa-Press – Mauritius. <\/strong><\/span>It\u2019s a bright February morning at Bois Cheri, a 250-acre tea farm near the southern rim of Mauritius, when Alina Roytberg and Lev Glazman, founders of the beauty brand Fresh, arrive for a long-awaited site visit.<\/p>\n The day before, it was pouring rain, as is often the case in this balmy, low-altitude stretch of the island, situated some 700 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean.<\/p>\n But today, the weather is a picture-perfect 82 degrees and sunny, as if minding its manners for jet-lagged guests. Cotton-ball clouds dot a serene blue sky, and underneath, rows of plush Camellia sinensis plants stretch nearly to the horizon.<\/p>\n Tea has flourished\u2014rather against the odds\u2014on this plot of volcanic terrain since 1892, making loose-leaf tins of Bois Cheri a familiar sight in household pantries across the region.<\/p>\n Now, in collaboration with Fresh, the property\u2019s single-estate black tea is pressed into a different kind of service: as a patented extract that powers the skin-reviving Tea Elixir Serum.<\/p>\n This kind of farm-to-bottle skin care has made occasional inroads in recent years, mirroring movements in food and fashion to elevate transparency within sourcing.<\/p>\n Lately, as conversations around sustainability in the beauty industry advance beyond packaging concerns to encompass the full scope of production, the prospect of forging a direct partnership with a supplier means that a company like Fresh\u2014well resourced, as part of the LVMH stable of brands\u2014can help shape that arc from the ground up.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s more than just an ingredient,\u201d explains Roytberg, with short-cropped hair and a pashmina guarding her arms against the sun.<\/p>\n Quietly perceptive with an acerbic wit, she strikes a complementary foil to Glazman\u2019s bubbling enthusiasm. \u201cIt\u2019s not only about where the plant comes from\u2014it\u2019s about the place where it grows and the people that harvest it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s truly about the nature of the planet.<\/p>\n \u201d That message is front of mind for an island republic existentially primed to take climate change seriously.<\/p>\n Solar panels and wind turbines dot the vistas on Mauritius, where the government has announced plans to phase out coal-based energy production by 2030. A roadside mural on the way to Bois Cheri shows a cartoon Earth pedaling a bicycle, with a reminder to \u201cPlease Recycle.<\/p>\n \u201d In teaming with the tea farm, Fresh set out to become a member of the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT)\u2014the first among the LVMH maisons to sign on with the nonprofit.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a global body, and we started with them during the pandemic, so it was really kind of a crazy time to [undertake] this,\u201d Roytberg says, reflecting on the maze of logistics.<\/p>\n The organization verifies that companies uphold a suite of fundamental principles, which include conserving biodiversity and respecting labor rights\u2014down to such specifics as accessible washrooms.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you use ingredients not to feed yourself, but for cosmetics and other things, you want to find a way to do it sustainably,\u201d says Glazman, his eyes lighting up in the waist-high tea fields as a worker plucks a flush of young leaves.<\/p>\n Nearby bushes reveal traces of previous machine-assisted harvesting, but Bois Cheri is further retooling its practices with the beauty brand\u2019s encouragement, leaning into hand-picking for the sake of the highest quality yields.<\/p>\n For Glazman and Roytberg, who launched their business in 1991 and built an early fan base with Fresh\u2019s handsomely wrapped bar soaps, the appeal of tea has always been second-nature. The two hail from samovar culture: Roytberg is originally from Ukraine, while Glazman grew up in Russia and Israel.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Black Tea launched in 2008,\u201d Roytberg says, referring to the initial face cream and mask that sparked an eventual collection around the antioxidant-rich ingredient, \u201cit was the black tea of our youth.<\/p>\n \u201d As much as there was an undercurrent of nostalgia for the founders, tea also acted like a skeleton key, slotting into similar rituals the world over. The first-hand glimpse into the Mauritian tea process cements what Roytberg\u2014with more reverence than marketingspeak\u2014calls a \u201cjourney in a jar.<\/p>\n \u201d On the third floor of the Bois Cheri factory, just-picked leaves emptied from field sacks blanket one side of the room, as box fans help facilitate a 24-hour drying period.<\/p>\n In another zone, the leaves are finely chopped, and the resulting powder migrates along a ground-level conveyor belt, shifting to a nutty oxidized brown during a brief fermentation period.<\/p>\n The heady perfume in the air is uncannily familiar\u2014akin to falling inside Alice in Wonderland\u2019s tea caddy. The other part of Fresh\u2019s involvement on the island is just as verdant, albeit in the primordial sense.<\/p>\n The Bel Ombre Nature Reserve, a lush biosphere designated in 1977, encompasses a tropical evergreen forest that amounts to about 4% of the country\u2019s footprint.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the only pristine place left,\u201d says Vinesh Gopal,<\/b> acting deputy director of the National Parks and Conservation Service, who spearheaded the recent effort to secure Bel Ombre\u2019s place in the UNESCO Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme.<\/p>\n \u201cIf Mauritius were flat, we would not have any native forest left.<\/p>\n \u201d In other words, the industries that have transformed the island\u2014notably sugar cane, introduced in the 17th century during the Dutch colonial period and cultivated throughout the subsequent French and British rule\u2014would have spared no patch of earth, but for the fact of inhospitable terrain.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth remembering, Gopal points out, that Mauritius was once home to the poster animal of extinction. \u201cThe dodo was in fact the first species to be recorded as extinct,\u201d he says of the flightless bird devastated by early settlers and immortalized on the Mauritian rupee.<\/p>\n An illustrated dodo also decorates the bright orange boxes of coconut-flavored Bois Cheri tea. <\/a>A similar fate looms for the island\u2019s biodiversity as a whole, between the destruction of virgin habitats and the encroaching reach of invasive animals and plants.<\/p>\n Fresh aims to support such conservation efforts through a five-year commitment with UNESCO\u2019s MAB. As Agathe Bernadot, senior manager of sustainable development at Fresh, tells it, Gopal was the one who suggested focusing on a threatened plant from the IUCN Red List.<\/p>\n \u201cHe said, \u2018What if you were to adopt one species? That would be amazing.<\/p>\n \u2019 Then we took it up to our CEO, and she said, \u2018Why not three?\u2019\u201d One is the crimson-petaled national flower, Trochetia boutoniana, also known as boucle d\u2019oreille in Mauritian Creole\u2014thought to be extinct for nearly a century, with some 500 plants currently in the wild.<\/p>\n A palm tree (Hyophorbe vaughanii) and flowering shrub (Erythroxylum laurifolium) complete the trio. Rallying around native species might have another benefit.<\/p>\n Because endemic forests are better adapted to the local environment, they might capture more carbon than planted vegetation, adds Gopal, who also serves as the park system\u2019s chief scientific officer.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s a tall order to bottle up this sweeping mission in the form of a serum. \u201cSustainability is not black and white. Clearly the most sustainable thing to do is not to consume,\u201d Bernadot acknowledges by way of a conscientious caveat.<\/p>\n The goal, then, for the beauty brand was twofold. In the macro sense of the island, it was \u201cto understand how we can really have an impact,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n And on the microscopic level, the focus was on skin biology. The Mauritian tea\u2014reportedly more than twice as rich in phytocompounds as other teas\u2014fuels an exclusive ingredient called APT Technology.<\/p>\n (Short for Adaptive Phytocompound Tea, the name also alludes to the chemical energy generated in mitochondria\u2014a key process in healthy cellular function.) The Tea Elixir Serum is shown to boost skin metabolism, with reverberating effects that include a strengthened barrier and improved elasticity.<\/p>\n A support network emerges, at once internal and spanning thousands of miles. \u201cWe have a friendship with this country right now,\u201d Glazman says, as enormous fruit bats circle at dusk, far in the distance.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s pretty incredible.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/style\/2023\/06\/fresh-tea-elixir-serum-mauritius-biodiversity<\/b><\/p>\n For More News And Analysis About Mauritius<\/a> Follow Africa-Press<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BY LAURA REGENSDORF Africa-Press – Mauritius. It\u2019s a bright February morning at Bois Cheri, a 250-acre tea farm near the southern rim of Mauritius, when Alina Roytberg and Lev Glazman, founders of the beauty brand Fresh, arrive for a long-awaited site visit. The day before, it was pouring rain, as is often the case […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":31762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[233,245,241],"class_list":["post-31764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-news","category-files","tag-africa-press","tag-africa-press-mauritius","tag-mauritius"],"yoast_head":"\n